The Star

Our granddad was a quiet man. He loved to smoke his pipe after lunch on long, lazy Sunday afternoons, and we liked the sweet smell of the puffs in the air, it had something very relaxing about it, and it smelled much better than the acrid fumes from our father’s pipe.

On the first Sunday of Advent, our granddad would always sit at the head of the round family table, a cup of steaming Lapsang souchong by his side, and assemble the big Christmas star that would afterwards hang miraculously from the high ceiling in the entrance to our grandparents’ house until the Twelfth Night. It would shine day and night during the festive season, and it would presage the advent of Christ. The assembling of the beautiful white star didn’t seem like an easy thing, though, and it always took our granddad some time to do it. He kept consulting a crumpled, yellowed sheet with complicated instructions scribbled on it, and once the star was put together, our granddad lit another pipe and seemed relieved.

We loved that star, it was called Herrnhuter Stern, and it was said to come from a place far away in the north-east. It was old, and some of its spiky rays looked like they had been mended many times. Our granddad was given the star by his dad, so the story goes, and his dad had inherited it yet again from his dad. That star wasn’t just another star, it was a very impressive and important star. And it was almost the only star like it in our pretty medieval Swiss town on the Rhine.

When I moved to Berlin many years ago, I was astounded to see numerous stars just like our granddad’s behind the windows of the tall houses and in the doorways of the brick-red churches of my neighborhood during Christmas time. They were joyful and bright and they bid me welcome, and I felt at home. I had come closer to that faraway place steeped in legend near the border to Poland.