Adventi hírnök - Advent Courier

The Christmas season has started and here in Vereb the first Advent Sunday is celebrated with a community gathering.

We announce to you the joyful Advent

There is no place next to my hometown in Germany where I have seen or heard about the tradition of doing a village-wide Advent calendar with preparing windows and inviting the people of the village to come and look at them when they get revealed. Maybe I just missed it so far, but most of the people I talked to about it hadn't heard about this tradition before, either.

But other places have other traditions they use to celebrate the Christmas season or at least the beginning of it.

Here in Vereb the first Advent is celebrated with the whole village community. Over the afternoon more and more people come to the garden of the minicipal building, there is free tea and hot wine, cookies and cake. Some people also have freshly made Palinka and offering a taste of it to everyone who wants to.

In a room adjacent to the garden you can prepare an Advent wreath, the materials are all offered by the village and the room is well visited not only for the high-running heating.

After sunset - which is already around 16:00 over here - there are a few small presentations of different groups, there are a few singing Christmas and Advent songs in Hungarian, for example.

And this way I learned that the famous German Advent song Wir sagen euch an den lieben Advent (We announce to you the joyful Advent) has a Hungarian version, too, with the title Adventi hírnök - Advent courier.

With this I wish you all a joyful Advent season.