It's that time of the year again.
Which means, photos of American homes decked out for Christmas will soon be seen in photospreads on German websites and newspapers.
Or, thanks to Youtube, you can watch XMas drive-bys by Germans all year round, for example this one.
In contrast, Germany has looked dark and forbidding despite the fact that the Christmas tree as we know it was popularized here, then made its way to England and the rest of the world.
Even the year-round Christmas shop in the town of Rothenburg - an attraction visited by probably 80% of American soldiers stationed in Germany over the past 40 years - had no effect on the gloom of outdoor decorations in a country at 50 degrees north.
But it has not always been this way, and it is changing again.
It was the lady of the Turkish Kebab Shop who pointed out that Germans used to do outdoor decorations when she was a child. She loved these lights, she explained with a smile. Oh, and she is still a Muslim.
She also told us that the natives stopped putting garlands of light on shrubs and small trees.
We wondered why that was.
Had there been a war on Christmas, which the natives lost? Did the continued exodus from Churches manifest in dying lights?
As it turns out, the explanation was much simpler: the power bill. Electricity costs tripled in Germany over the last twenty years and stand at about 29 Euro cents per Kilowatt-hour.
How can we be sure?
Well, we cannot be certain but LEDs have taken off in the last two or three years, and so have outdoor Christmas lights.
By our non-representative count, the number of outdoor installations has approximately doubled compared to last year.
They are not as garish and involved as some American ones, but we have seen LED reindeer and multicolored LED strands.
Another reason might be that the local adolescent vandals have moved away or grown up. After all, someone cut our LED lights a couple of years back.
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