Last year around 84,500 tons of Christmas cookies were produced in Germany. Gingerbread has led the hit list by far for years, far ahead of speculoos and dominoes. So everyone eats an average of one kilo of this candy per season. That doesn’t necessarily sound like a sugar shock, because it’s not that much, calculated in wafer gingerbread that’s just five packets. Especially if you have to split this ration from the end of August to New Year’s Eve, some people only have a few crumbs left long before Christmas Eve if every German sticks with their kilos.
If it were up to the cabaret artist Günter Grünwald, it would actually not be allowed to sell or even eat gingerbread while the outdoor pools are still open. According to his “Grünwald Gingerbread Law”, “the placing on the market and consumption of gingerbread and similarly stored Christmas baked goods before November 9th of the current year is punishable by imprisonment for not less than four years. There are twelve Bockfotzn optionally.”
Quite rightly so, many will say, while the others are reaching out, because gingerbread in late summer has actually not been a topic of excitement for decades and also tastes good in autumn. How much gingerbread is still dividing society was revealed by a survey by the opinion research institute Civey last year, according to which 45.2 percent of Germans will “definitely” buy gingerbread in September, the other half are more or less undecided and 16 .7 percent, mostly women and the elderly, would never do this.
Apparently, these are also the people who get sick of the sight of Christmas cookies immediately after returning from their summer vacation. Yes, the entire relaxation can be gone very quickly with a vanilla crescent in September. For supermarket employees, grumpy gingerbread haters are part of the third quarter. But they obviously don’t want to endure such expected rants about the autumn pastries – yes, the confectionery industry actually calls them that – in silence any longer and are now fighting back. In a full-range retailer in Taufkirchen, they put up a sign with a clear warning next to the newly arrived pallets with the packages of gingerbread: “If there’s so much complaining this year, we’ll put it out even earlier next year,” it says – with a smiley, though , but probably meant seriously.