Ein Nachmittag mit Freunden

We enjoyed a quite morning at home this Sunday.  Dennis has been reading an insanely long book auf Deutsch, with his goal being to finish it before we return to the states.  He still has a couple hundred pages to go, but he did get to whittle away at that number a little this morning, while I kicked around and, at times, distracted him with card games.

Five Stars! The critics are raving!

Meanwhile, the kids reveled in watching Christmas cartoons and making forts in the living room.  Since most Swiss restaurants are closed on Sundays, in a keen entrepreneurial move, the kids made their own.  Alex was named waiter; Joey, professional eater (a job that fits him well); and Ella was chief cook and bottle washer, and entertainer besides, because "all fine restaurants have music." This, I take it, she learned from Europa-Park.

Playing in the leaves, waiting for the bus

A quiet morning at home suited us well since we had a lot of fun planned for the afternoon.  One of Dennis's coworkers, Steffen, invited us to spend some time with his family.  He has two older daughters, fourteen and sixteen, and Ella was quivering with excitement at the thought of spending some time with older girls.

We took the post bus to get to Steffen's house. It's always amazing to me how quickly Zürich melts into the countryside. Three minutes on a bus and you're there, with the green fields and cows. Steffen had the perfect idea of taking out into some of this scenery, going for a the family hike in the woods near his house, his wife and one of his daughters joining us. (I did tell you, the Sunday hike is a grand tradition in this country.)

Unfortunately, Steffen lives at the top of a steep hill, and Joey (a little too conveniently for him) decided to fall asleep in my arms right at the base of it.  But once we were on our way into the woods, and Joey's unconsciousness was deep enough that he no longer protested being moved from my arms, Dennis took over.

It's too bad that Joey missed the walk. He would have loved it: Ella and Alex certainly did.  Steffen and his family spoke German to our kids, knowing that it would make them feel proud, and Ella attached herself to Steffen's daughter for most of the hike.

The woods were really appealing for the kids, and Steffen made it even more fun, joining the kids on balance-beam walks across fallen trees, helping them look for mushrooms, and showing them a pond that was filled with enormous black carp, fish with a curious nature, swimming to the shore to watch us watch them, even though we had no bread in our pockets.

Alex's favorite part was when we found a pile of recently fallen branches, which were riddled with stems of mistletoe.  Usually mistletoe is unreachable: it attaches itself to the high branches of trees.  (Dennis says that often people harvest it with help from a shotgun.)  But but here was loads of it, and the kids and Steffen set to work, harvesting, proudly handing me a huge bundle of it for decorating the house.

Alex saved one sprig for himself.
Hel-lo, ladies!

Our own new Christmas decorations.

At the end of their walk, we got a tour of Steffen's pretty house.  His wife was in the middle of making some window decorations in the style of the homes of Gimmelwald. (If you follow the link, you can see the windows at 4:10.) As I learned from Rick Steves, in this town, twenty-five homes join to make a village-wide advent calendar. Each day, one of them swings a shuttered window open to display a home-made faux-stained glass numbered scene, made from paint, or tissue paper, or, as Steffen's family does, with dyed silk. They'd also made their own family advent calender by tying twenty-four little bags to their banister, of different colors and shapes: each family member was in charge of filling six of them, so that everyone could share in the surprise.

Dennis and I were so touched by the trouble these kind people went to for us, setting a beautiful little table with a delicious apple tart and cookies, not to mention all of the cleaning I know they did. It was an immense treat, made better by their daughter keeping the kids entertained with various board games. Those were lovely daughters: I hope we can come close to doing as well with our kids.

Because we were constricted by an hourly bus, we didn't leave until about 6:00, taking our children home in the dark, their tempers short from all of the excitement and the late hour.  Ella and Alex inevitably had a spat on the way home, but, cutely, afterwards they made up so thoroughly that Alex desperately wanted to share a bedroom with Ella tonight, and so she offered to sit in the dark with him for the ten or so minutes it took him to fall asleep.