Well this summer my wife and I took our first trip to Germany, to Europe even, and I guess I was enthusiastic enough to send a hint for good Christmas gifts this year, because a vast majority of my presents has something to do with Germany! I’m not complaining, I was thrilled with them all, so I thought I would share them here.

 

 

 

 

 

First off my wife got me a German Cookbook and made a full German meal out of it including a currywurst appetizer, a main meal of Weinerschnitzel, potatoes, bacon and onions, red cabbage, and a berry compote for dessert, es war sehr lecker! Here is a picture of the book (I wish I had taken a picture of the meal too, but I thought of it too late and it was already half devoured, haha).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then I received another nice surprise from my wife. Recently I have begun trying to research my family heritage some more because we really don’t know anything before 1922 and I was also curious about my family crest, if one even existed (as you might have noticed me posting the forums about). So she managed to find a website that does genealogical research specific to family crests and they found a German family crest for the Deubert name (or for a similar derivative name, I haven’t gotten confirmation which yet) and she had it etched on a nice tall beer glass for me. I was very excited to find this out because several of my other German and Irish friends had their family crests made into rings or tatoo’s and so I was very curious to see it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finally the last gift from my wife, which actually just arrived tonight (it took 4 weeks to get shipped here from Germany), was this really cool set of Düsseldorf Altbier glasses from Schlösser. They are the traditional size (8 ounce I believe) beer glasses used specifically for drinking Altbeir. All 4 of these glasses are different and have different sites or sehenswürdigkeiten (that’s a new word I just learned today in my GermanPod101 lesson, which is a whole nother blog post I am working on). One has the Gehry Neuer Zollhof buildings, another has the Rheinturm, another has the Düsseldorf Tonhalle which is a concert hall, and the fourth has the Düsseldorf Schlossturm or castle tower.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So then of course the first thing I had to do was fill it with Altbier!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then on to the gifts from my parents. I got a couple cool t-shirts, one of the Autobahn symbol, which was definitely one of the highlights of our cross-country Germany trip. I am only just slowing back down now, 6 months later after nearly 2 weeks of driving there on the Autobahn. The good news is it took the edge off my my wife riding with me on the highway here, after doing the speeds we were doing there she could care less about me going 80-85mph . The next shirt should be pretty self explanatory if you’ve ever heard the German expression “Ich liebe dich” which means “i love you” except in this case it says “Ich liebe bier!”, haha!

 

 

 

Also I got this Deutschland license plate frame which can be found here along with a bunch of other German things here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finally, last but not least I got a couple more German themed gifts from my in-laws, one very neat one and one very funny one. I got this beer stein which is really cool because I can actually say I’ve been to 3 out of the 5 places on it including Rothenburg, Berlin, and München (I’ll have to make a trip to Heidelberg and Neuschwanstein next time). Also one of the kind of annoying things when we were looking at the steins in the German gift shops was that a lot of them only said “Germany” on them which seems kind of unauthentic, so I am glad this one actually says Deutschland on it. Also I like that this one advertises on the tag that it was made entirely in Germany and had no parts made in China (Keine China-ware).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then for the funniest gift of all I got this t-shirt…

So that’s it for me, it was quite a good Christmas for me this year. Did you get anything “German” for Christmas? If so tell us about it in the forum, we’d love to hear about it!