ARE you finding the festive season more ho-hum than ho-ho these days? SUE PRESTON finds the perfect antidote to Christmas malaise – a trip around Austria during Advent, the weeks leading up to Christmas.
THERE’S nothing like a visit to the Christmas markets to strip the years away in an instant. It’s not just children who are mesmerised by the sights and smells of the markets – people of all ages move with child-like wonder through aisles stocked with baubles and beeswax, cookies and punch.
Under a mass of decorative lights, myriad stalls flicker and beckon, and the air is filled with the aroma of roasting chestnuts and sizzling German sausages.
People in warm coats, scarves and hats toast their gloved hands in front of braziers, or warm them by wrapping them around a mug of aromatic mulled wine.
Austria’s convivial Christmas markets, where families and groups of friends come to browse, shop and, above all, socialise, are a complete contrast to the highly commercialised and chaotic rush that characterise Christmas shopping for most Australians.
Here, the Christmas markets sell mostly inexpensive hand-made, hand-crafted items that stallholders have spent a good part of the year making.
Giant Christmas trees hewn from nearby woods, some as high as 30 metres, are festooned with thousands of multi-coloured bulbs, baubles and tinsel.
Visiting a Christmas market in Austria is like stepping into one of those lovely cards with glitter-covered fir trees and rosy-cheeked children. It’s like walking across the threshold of a large neighbourhood party where everyone is welcome and embraced.
People talk and laugh as they cluster around carollers, admire nativity scenes, watch their children spin around on old-fashioned amusement rides, and good-naturedly make room around open-air fires for chilled tourists from the southern hemisphere.
Visiting Austria for a week last December I discover what makes the festive season so special in this country and how Austrian families prepare for, and celebrate, Christmas.
I learn how to make traditional Christmas cookies, discover the story behind the much-loved snow dome, learn the origins of the world’s earliest carols and visit the Christmas Museum to see the toys and other heirloom symbols that captivated children a century ago and still do today.
I begin my journey in the beautiful old city of Graz, the capital of Styria, a three-hour direct train ride from Vienna’s international airport.
The city’s small but atmospheric Christmas market proves a wonderful introduction to the festive season with the facade of the Rathaus (Town Hall) illuminated at dusk and the ice nativity scene in the Landhause courtyard a draw-card for wide-eyed children.
The city’s centrepiece, a 60-year-old, 28-metre spruce tree, glitters with what I’m reliably told is a staggering 25,000 lights.
At the suggestion of the local tourist office I visit the quaintly named Office for Christmas Carols, which opens a month before Christmas in a section of a shop selling traditional crafts and attire. Overseen by Dr Eva Maria Hols, the office has been collecting carols and folksongs for 25 years and is a repository for more than 30,000 carols from around the world.
For Dr Hols one of the greatest things the office does is reunite people with forgotten carols and Christmas melodies from their childhood.
“If we don’t collect these songs they will be lost,” she explains. “Not just songs, but stories and poems about Christmas. By giving back these carols from their childhood we can make Christmas as nice as when we were five years old.”
Each year the office makes and sells a book of traditional Christmas songs in recognition of the fact that people who don’t sing a note during the year will sing at Christmas.
“Everybody has to sing on the evening of the 24th. It’s easy to forget the texts given it’s a once a year event,” Dr Hols says.
From Graz it’s an easy and enjoyable three-hour train ride to Salzburg’s delightful Christmas markets, the origins of which date back to the 15th century.
It’s hard to imagine a more perfect setting than this UNESCO World Heritage site city with its skyline dominated by churches, castles and palaces.
After exploring the city on a walking tour, I trade the cold for the warmth of the Christmas Museum in Mozartplatz Square in the old part of the city. The main exhibition is made up of 11 themed sections complemented by displays of nativity scenes and Christmas decorations and toys from 1840-1940.
What makes this exhibition so special is the cultural and historical significance of each exhibit, collected by museum owner Ursula Kloiber over almost 40 years.
One of the most captivating displays is the collection of Advent calendars. Today many Austrian children still count down the days on these calendars with 24 small numbered doors to be opened from December 1-24, revealing pictures or sayings along with a sweet or other treat.
When I emerge from the museum, the temperature has dropped even further – but it would be foolhardy to head indoors because night-time is when Christmas festivities really come to life. Lights strung around the city go on about 4.30, transforming the night sky into a low-lying carpet of twinkling stars.
Later, I join others at the world-renowned Mozart dinner concert at Stiftskeller St Peter (St Peter Monastery) to dine by candlelight in a Baroque hall on fare prepared from recipes from the 18th century – white soup with rosemary-quark dumpling and breast of roasted capon.
On stage, singers and musicians in period costumes perform the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Next morning I am back on the train for the two-and-a-half hour journey from Salzburg to Vienna. Travelling by train is a wonderful way to move between Austria’s major cities. The trains are clean, comfortable and fast, with large windows affording good views of the constantly changing landscape, including, at this time of year, the first glimpse of snowcapped mountains.
This is not my first trip to Vienna, but the first time I have visited in December.
I find it a city transformed. The streets are festooned with lights – 2.5 million bulbs.
Vienna’s Christmas markets are, not surprisingly, much larger and perhaps more commercial than those of Graz and Salzburg, but they are still a delight.
While there is plenty for traditionalists, there are also stalls and activities such as ice-skating and curling for those who prefer a more contemporary celebration. Handcrafts and designer goods happily co-exist here.
But first I want to learn about baking, a traditional Advent activity. For that my travelling companions and I head to Wrenkh, a restaurant and cooking school in Vienna, to learn how to cook a traditional Christmas dinner and Viennese Christmas cookies.
We roll up our sleeves and set to making favourites such as zimtsterne (star-shaped cookies rolled in cinnamon) and vanillekipferi (small vanilla shaped crescents made of shortbread and chopped and ground nuts). I’d like to say they lasted long enough to be brought back to Australia to grace the Christmas table. but alas, no.
I did, however, come home with a snow globe from Vienna’s intriguing SnowGlobeMuseum. In an unassuming building in one of Vienna’s outer suburbs, Erwin Perzy the Third carries on the family tradition of making traditional and contemporary snow globes.
Perzy’s grandfather invented the snow globe in 1900. He originally sold globes with little models of the Basilica to pilgrims, but gradually began introducing globes with snowmen and fir trees.
Today, 200,000 of Perzy’s snow globes are produced each year to find new homes around the globe.
From humble beginnings, there are now 350 designs in four sizes and the business employs 40 people, making 90 per cent of the globes by hand.
The recipe for the artificial snow is still a well-guarded family secret.
We learn that one of Perzy’s globes sat on Bill Clinton’s desk in the Oval Office for the duration of his presidency. A friend of the president collected confetti from the inauguration celebrations, sent it to Vienna and Perzy cut the confetti smaller and used it instead of “snow”.
If you intend to be back in Australia for Christmas Day you can safely leave your Christmas shopping to Vienna or, more specifically, to Shopping with Lucie.
A stylist from New York now living in Vienna, Lucie will take you to places you would never find on your own to buy chic items from designer clothing to accessories, home wares, chocolates and fine china.
My week in Austria comes to a fitting end with the gala evening Christmas in Vienna concert at the stunning Vienna Concert Hall, one of the most renowned Christmas concerts in Europe. International artists accompanied by the Vienna Boys Choir thrill the audience with traditional and contemporary renditions of some of our best-loved carols.
It’s enough to bring a smile to the face of the most hardened Yuletide grump.
If you go...
STAY:
Graz: Hotel zum Dom Palais Inzaghi, a boutique hotel in the city centre – www.domhotel.co.at
Salzburg Weisse Taube,Salzburg, centrally located in an historic building – www.weissetaube.at
Vienna: Grand Hotel Wien, ideally located on Karntner Ring, a short stroll to the Opera House and retail precinct. The 205 spacious rooms and suites in the five-star hotel are designed in typical Viennese style – www.grandhotelwien.com
GETTING AROUND:
Visit www.railplus.com.au for information about rail passes or point to point tickets within Austria.
USEFUL WEBSITES:
* Sue Preston was a guest of the Austrian National Tourist Office.
