Sankt Martin

Last night was Sankt Martin. The kids come 'round the neighborhood with little lanterns and knock on your door and WAIT. Get this. They sing you a song!! Simon sung it for me this morning; it goes something like: The stars are up high in the sky/ and we have our lanterns down here./ We're going around to ask you a question/ and we hope that you'll be there. Now it's like remembering a dream and the harder I try to remember, the more it evades me. I'll attempt to persuade Simon and his friend to sing it to me again later.

Back to that evening: The boys in the photo sung (sang?) their song and I stood in the doorway with an expression on my face like I'd just dropped a ton of ecstacy and came across a herd of unicorns. When they finished, I held out the appropriated bowl of candy because Sankt Martin is kinda what the Germans do instead of Halloween. They then obliged to a photo for this American tourist. Aren't their lanterns great? Aren't their faces adorable?

For someone that insists she's never going to put her overies to any use, I certainly obsess a good deal about all the cute things that children do. You have no idea how much I think about good names for kids either.

Why Sankt Martin? The dude was apparently a Roman soldier and later became a monk. He shared his cloak with a beggar during a snow storm and then dreamed that he'd been sharing it with Jesus. Jesus appreciated the gesture and somehow that brought Martin down the immortal road of sainthood. In some obscure way, that ends up translating to nominating a day where kids can walk around a neighborhood with paper lanterns and ask for candy. Hi! I'm Rachel, queen of butchering biblical stories.