11th November - A memorable day

In the UK & most of the commonwealth (not NZ), today is Remembrance, Poppy or Armistice Day, the 1st WW having ended at 11:00am. It's also for the same reason a holiday in France & Belgium and it's Veteran's Day in the USA. Germany's equivalent is on the Sunday closest to 16th November.

Today is celebrated/noted in Germany for other reasons:

Dubiously it's the start of Carnival at 11:11 a.m., mainly being celebrated in Cologne & Mainz, the Carnival capitals. Luckily nothing really happens until after New Year. Difficult to find real justification for this event but it has probably been hijacked from the start of the 40 day fasting period starting tomorrow as though it had something to do with the 40 days of Lent.

It was traditionally the day the farmers paid their annual rent in the form of "payment in kind" (cash payment actually cost more in real terms). Although from medieval times, it is still in use here in our very rural area, it's the day many farming rental agreements start & end.

The two above may account for the goose population being desecrated today, filling bellies before the fasting or paying the rent. However it is said that St Martin of Tours who's day it is, ordered the killing of geese after they gave him away while hiding so as not to become the Bishop of Tours. See Emmy's Blip from yesterday to read how they do it in Denmark.

As all Blipers wll know, St Martin is the patron saint of France and the poor. This second fact is celebrated mainly by kindergarten children throughout Germany. Normally after dark, a church service followed by a procession holding lanterns and proceeded by a rider on a white horse/pony dressed in Roman military gear and wearing a red cape. In our village the procession ends at St Florian's place (only two Blipers I know will be able to identify the place) with food & drink for children, parents and the voluntary firemen who closed off the roads. I won't bore you with all the detail about St Martin especially as I only learnt most of it myself today but he was quite a remarkable and extraordinarily travelled guy, living to a very stately age of 81 and that was in the 4th Century. A true European and even the English honoured him with St Martin-in-the-Fields.

So that was where I was this evening with the dogs but we had our walk in Erkheim this afternoon including a photosession in a sunflower patch! Boy has it turned cold, no lying snow this morning but it stayed around 4°C all day even when the sun came out & tonight will probabyl be our first real frost. MrB dropped by at about 7:30 pm testing out his tractor before tomorrows MOT. He rescued a couple of fennels from the garden and I tried to find a few things from the greehouse - toms, red & beer radishes, celery and a few slugs no doubt. If anything looks usable tomorrow, I will have to make some soup - it's staying cold they say.

Apology: MrB has asked me to point out that his deer pate referred to over the last week or so is not made by a butcher but by a colleague of his who also has a Galloway herd as a "hobby" and makes loads of such meat "dishes" - she is very talented if the pate is anything to go by. Sorry for the mistake.

PS I used this photo as I first thought a miracle had happened, a streak of lightning from a cloudless sky. Took me a while to realise it was an overhanging birch twig caught in the flash!