Despite Corona, so-called Christmas houses are shining again in many places across Germany this year. Whether Delmenhorst in the north, Balzhausen in the south, Oberhausen in the west or Merseburg in the east – there and in many other places private people have lavishly decorated their houses and gardens and switched on tens of thousands of lights even before the first Advent on this Sunday.
“It’s a certain hobby. We don’t have any children ourselves and we do it for the public,” says Josef Glogger from Balzhausen in Bavaria. 35,000 to 40,000 LEDs illuminate his house, garden and a crib set up there. At Glogger, things are still comparatively simple, he relies on contemplative white: “Better a uniform color. I think that brightly colored things don’t go well with the Christmas season, at least not in our area,” he says.
“There is nothing that is not illuminated”
Dirk van Acken from Oberhausen in the Ruhr area falls into a decorative frenzy with his wife every late autumn, when the festival is slowly approaching. He not only decorates his house from the outside: Snowmen, nutcrackers, reindeer, countless figures and Christmas trinkets of all kinds are cleared from their overcrowded garage into their 94-square-meter apartment.
In Merseburg in Saxony-Anhalt, a 91-year-old turns a settlement house into a Christmas fairy tale. At the push of a button, a huge pyramid rotates, an oversized arch begins to glow, and visitors sound a carillon and a music box. Herbert Thews has practiced this hobby for almost half of his life, as he says. Thews is a little poor in health, but he doesn’t want to miss his Christmas hobby. “As a pensioner you need a job.”
The Borchart family’s house in Delmenhorst near Bremen is now known far beyond Lower Saxony. “There is nothing that is not illuminated,” says Sven Borchart, who decorated the house together with his wife Martina Borchart and their grown son. “The big reward are children who stand in front of the gate with big eyes and ask if Santa Claus lives here.”