Last time around, I craved no foods (in fact if I could have avoided altogether something so repulsive as eating, I would have) and so far, again, no cravings of the alimentary kind. What I do crave is winter and Christmas. With pregnancy #1 I began listening to Nat King Cole crooning about roasting chestnuts sometime around early September. This time, I'd say it was probably mid July when I started having vivid memories of a vacation spot we visited the winter of my 7th birthday in Austria. I know it was that winter because on that trip we smuggled our puppy across the German-Austrian border; she was hidden on the floor of the backseat, below my feet, and covered in a blanket. She was a beautiful little border collie with a title - Anita von den Waldburgen (we just called her 'Nita') and we got her when I was 6.
Shortly after we crossed the border, we arrived at our destination, a cozy little town where we had rented a typically Germanic cottage, complete with deep brown wooden beams, the way you see them in all the postcards (not that anyone sees postcards anymore). On the approach to the house, we saw several of these little houses, nestled deeply in a deliciously thick frosting of untouched snow. And a heavy, whipped frosting hung over the edge of each roof. The day was bright and made the enormous icicles hanging along the roofline of these little gingerbread houses absolutely glow as brilliantly as if they each contained the fire of the sun itself. These icicles are the kind that the little twinkly Christmas light icicles are modeled after, but the manufactured kind can never approach the beauty of the magnificent, dripping crystals of my memory. They were so large, that the ones on each end of the sloped roofs, where the refracted rays of the sun glistened the brightest, just kissed the top of the thick snow below.
After that, my memory fades. I remember nothing else of this trip, but I can replay that approach over and over, and it's the kind of beauty, even in the mind, that moves you emotionally. It must have moved me pretty deeply even then, when I was 6 or 7, for me to remember it for so long without pictures to aid me. What can I say? I'm the woman that dreamed of the romance of a wedding, draped in fur, in an ice hotel in the far north.
This morning, I woke from sleep with a similar memory, also from my childhood in Germany, also in winter. It's the Christmas Market at Marienplatz, the old town square in Munich. I saw the rows and rows of stalls glowing with twinkly lights. I saw vendors selling their traditional, German, hand-made Christmas ornaments and decorations, felt the sting of the cold on my face, and smelled the sweet-spiced German pastries and hot drinks being sold nearby. I also remember the glockenspiel and everything stopping as people watched the figurines in their mechanical show above the square. I am not sure if it played during the evening market scene I experienced, but it seems romantic to remember it that way, so I do.
Christmas in Germany was magical.
As soon as this memory came to me, I grabbed the iPhone on my nightstand and began searching online. Oh, thank you internet! I saw photo after photo of that very scene and I was filled with so much nostalgia I couldn't stop tearing up over it. I felt the sudden need to go back and experience it again. If I wasn't going to be so very pregnant this Christmas, I'd push for us to go then, but George tells me that if I wasn't going to be so very pregnant, he'd be pushing for us to spend Christmas in Colombia. Hmm... Still not sure I'm ready to go there.
