Easter in Stuttgart – The religious background

On Easter, Christians all over the world celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ and so do we in Germany. According to the Christian Bible, Jesus has been crucified on Good Friday and revived on Easter Sunday. So Easter Sunday (Ostersonntag) is the day when the main celebrations are going on. Religious people attend a special service at church, but even nonreligious families gather, have brunch or lunch together and organize games and presents for the kids.

Easter in Stuttgart – Fun traditions

We have many fun Easter traditions here in Germany:

Painted Easter eggs

The Easter eggs are probably THE symbol of Easter. There are two ways how you can prepare your own, pretty Easter eggs: You can boil eggs until they are hard and color them. Or you take raw eggs, blow out the egg yolk and white, color the shell as well and put a thread through it so that you can put it in a tree or branches of trees you have brought home with you on your last stroll. And of course there are the countless chocolate eggs you can find in every store. They are the most popular Easter eggs amongst kids 🙂

Fun fact: In Sonnenbühl, a small town close to Stuttgart, you can visit a special museum dedicated to Easter eggs!

Easter rabbit

The Easter bunny or rabbit is most beloved by the kids as it brings chocolate Easter eggs and presents! 🙂 But the Easter rabbit is not as nice as Santa Clause who places his presents always at the same spot. No, no, no. You have to find the eggs and the Easter nest first and believe me, the Easter rabbit is VERY good in hiding his presents. When you have a garden, look behind every branch! Sometimes the nest is even hidden in a tree. But nests can also be found inside houses and apartments. The Easter bunny really goes everywhere 🙂 Tipp for the helpers of the Easter bunny (aka parents): write down where the bunny has hidden the nests! It has happened to more than one family that they found nests months later! 😀 So what is in the nest you might ask now. Usually sweets like chocolate eggs, chocolate rabbits and sometimes even little toys.

Historical fun fact: Easter eggs and bunnies date back to pagan worshipping.  They used to be symbols of fertility and were used for celebrating spring.

Baked Easter lamb

The tradition of the baked Easter lamb goes back generations and before chocolate eggs became popular, it was the main treat after the long time of lent. The traditional baked Easter lamb is made with yeast dough (Hefeteig). You can either buy an Easter lamb in every bakery or create one yourself (there are many recipes on the internet).

The symbol behind the lamb: The lamb refers to Jesus Christ who took his crucification like a sacrificial lamb.

Colorful Easter trees

When you walk through your neighborhood or visit German friends you will see colorful decorated trees or branches. Decoration trees with painted eggs definitely looks gorgeous and adds some more color to the awakening nature.

After I did some research I found out that this tradition can be traced back to one family from Thuringia. More than fifty years ago the Kraft family started to decorate an apple tree in their garden with colorful eggs.

Easter markets

Easter markets are the little sisters and brothers of our famous Christmas markets. Here you will find beautiful artwork as well as sweet treats. They are definitely worth a visit, not only if you’re still in need of the one or other Easter decoration object. However, this year, in times of the Corona crisis, the markets won’t take place unfortunately.

Easter fountains

When you see a nicely decorated fountain these days you have found an Ester fountain! They are especially famous here in the southern part of Germany. The most famous fountain can be found in Bieberach by the way.

Fun Easter games

Many games exist that will keep your little ones busy on Easter.

Egg tapping used to be my favorite game. You need two players and two hard boiled eggs. The players tap the eggs against each other. Whose egg breaks loses this round.

Another fun game is the egg run. You can play this with a larger group of children. Everybody gets a spoon and a hard boiled egg. You define a parcours the kids have to run. Then the eggs get placed on the spoon and the game starts. The first player to finish the parcours with an unbroken egg wins the game.

And then there is egg roll. You need a hill for this game. The players place their hard boiled eggs at the top of the hill and let them roll down. Whose egg crosses the finish line first wins this game.

Easter in Stuttgart – The dates in 2021

April 2, 2021: Good Friday/Karfreitag (public holiday)

Good Friday is the day where Jesus was killed according to the Christian Bible. So this day is usually a quiet public holiday. Religious families will serve fish on this day and avoid meat.

Culinary fun fact: When you’re living in Stuttgart for a while already you might have come across one of our Swabian specialities: Maultaschen. Did you know that there is a fun, historical legend behind these local “raviolies”?! This is how the saying goes: Smart Cistercian monks of Maulbronn Abbey didn’t want to resign from eating meat on Good Friday so they came up with the idea of hiding it inside the pasta-like dish, assuming god wouldn’t notice. That’s why Maultaschen have a very special nickname: Herrgottsbscheisserle – what could be translated to god-cheaters. 🙂

April 3, 2021: (Easter) Saturday

The Saturday after Good Friday isn’t a public holiday. Shops will be open. But if possible, do your shopping for the long weekend before Easter Saturday as the stores will be crowded and it will be hard to maintain the 1.5 meter distance between customers.

April 4, 2021: Easter Sunday/Ostersonntag (public holiday)

Easter Sunday is the most important day of the Easter celebrations. Religious families will attend the service at church. Many people, friends and/or families, gather for brunch or lunch. The kids will start searching for the Easter nests. Taking an Easter stroll is also a tradition in many families however this year, it is recommended not to travel too far for your Easter stroll – or even better: stay at home.

April 5, 2021: Easter Monday/Ostermontag (public holiday)

This is usually another quiet day. In normal years many people like to go for walks and hikes, others drive back home from their visit of friends or family. However this year, how about spending a lazy Easter Monday at home 🙂

Please note that Easter in times of Corona will have to be celebrated a bit different. If you can, stay at home and don’t invite friends of family over. I know, this is hard. But it is the only way how we can prevent the virus from spreading any further.

How is Easter celebrated in your culture? Is it celebrated at all? Please share your story with us in the comments 🙂

Happy Easter everybody! Frohe Ostern!

Picture credit: canva.com

Transparency: This post is based on my own opinion and contains personal recommendations as well as affiliate links.

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German Christmas traditions: Advent calendar

We count down the days up to December 24 (the day we celebrate Christmas) with the help of an Advent calendar. The original version was made out of paper with flaps that cover 24 pictures. Nowadays, a great variety of Advent calendars exist: you can buy chocolate filled calendars in the supermarket or create an individual one for your loved ones with 24 little presents. Obviously, Advent calendars are intended for children but very often, couples or good friends create them for each other, too.

German Christmas traditions: Adventskranz/Advent wreath)

The story of the Advent wreath goes back to the 16th century and is actually an old German Lutheran tradition. Nowadays, nearly every family has one on their dinner table. Traditional Advent wreaths are circular in shape and made out of evergreens. Four candles are placed on the wreath and one after the other is lit on every Advent Sunday.

German Christmas traditions: Nikolaustag/Saint Nicholas Day

On December 6 we celebrate Saint Nicholas Day. Saint Nicholas is the patron saint of sailors, merchants, archers, repentant thieves, children, brewers, pawnbrokers and students and according to the legend he loved to give gifts to people.

Nowadays, Children put out one boot on the evening of December 5. When the check the boot the next morning, it is filled with nuts, oranges and chocolates – maybe even small toys. This was the secret gift of Saint Nicholas. Some kids might find a switch in their boot, too, telling them that they have behaved badly from time to time in the passing year and should be better next year (for the record: there was a switch in my boot EVERY SINGLE YEAR by the way! :-D)

German Christmas traditions: Christmas cookies and more

Advent is all about sweets. Not only on the Christmas markets you will find all sorts of candy, also the regular supermarkets are filled with chocolate Weihnachtsmänner. Moreover, it is a German Christmas tradition to bake your own Christmas cookies (called Plätzchen). There are many different types of Plätzchen, my favorite ones are Vanillekipferl /vanilla crescents (click here for recipe on bbcgoodfood.com) are Zimtsterne/cinnamon stars (click here for recipe on bbcgodfood.com). Pssssst: If you don’t want to bake them by yourself, check out the shelfs in the supermarket 😉

German Christmas traditions: Christmas Eve

In Germany, we celebrate Christmas on the eve of December 24. Families gather and have dinner together. Then everybody sits around the Christmas tree (that might be presented to the family for the first time that day). The tree is decorated with (false or real) candles, Christmas ornaments and glass baubles.  Presents are exchanged and opened and in some families songs are sung. It depends on the family tradition if Santa Claus (Weihnachtsmann) or the angel-like Christkind is the bringer of the gifts. In the end, both will work 😉 Religious families go to church – when they have small children they might choose the mass in the afternoon, families without small children usually prefer the Christmette at midnight.

German Christmas traditions: Christmas dinner

Don’t laugh but the traditional German dinner on Christmas Eve is sausages with potato salad! 😀 And it makes sense: December 24 has not been a public holiday for a long time – even today many employees have to work in the morning. So the afternoon was filled with wrapping the gifts and decorating the Christmas tree. There was no time to prepare a big dinner. Plus – obviously – we Germans love our sausages 😀 Even today many families keep the tradition alive and serve this simple meal on Christmas Eve. However, there are other meals that are served all over Germany as well, roast meat for example.

German Christmas traditions: The thing with the Christmas pickle…

You might have heard of a “German tradition” where Germans put up a pickle in the Christmas tree. I wrote about this before. If you want to find out, if this is a real German Christmas tradition, check out my former post – but be prepared for the truth… 😉

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Fasching in Stuttgart – the history behind it

The history of Fasching dates back many centuries. Wikipedia told me that even people in Mesopotamia celebrated a pre-version of it 5000 years ago… Impressive, I didn’t know that. In medieval times the celebrations became close to what we know nowadays. Fasching in Stuttgart follows the tradition of the Swabian-Alemannic Fasnet. While the celebrations in the Rhine area developed into a more modern way to the Rhine Carnival that is celebrated for example in Cologne nowadays, the Swabian-Alemannic Fasching – after following this development for a while, too – remembered its medieval roots. This is why Karneval in Cologne is much more jolly than the sometimes rather dark Fasching celebrations in Stuttgart – just look at the masks of the participants.

Fasching in Stuttgart – wild masks and characters

The traditional Swabian-Alemannic masks are called Häs. Most of them look quite scary, not jolly like the clowns or princesses most people would think of when they picture a Carnival celebration. These Häs have a long tradition and some of them are handed down from generation to generation.

You can find a number of characters amongst the Häs: jesters, witches, daemons, animals and legendary characters. As soon as someone puts on his or her Häs, they change their character and begin to act wild and sometimes even nasty, especially at Fasching parades. If you visit a parade with kids, have a close eye on them as they might get scared by the wild figures and performances. And it happens very often that children or teenagers get kidnapped by a group of witches or jesters who carry their victim with them for a while (that actually happened to my mum when she was a child – you might guess she never became a big fan of Fasching afterwards…)

But of course you don’t need a traditional Häs to join a Fasching party! You will notice that most people will dress up in “normal” costumes, too.

Fasching in Stuttgart – when is it celebrated?

The version of Fasching that was celebrated in pre-Christian times originated in the wish of the people to drive away winter – and with it its dark spirits. That’s why the masks, the Häs, look so scary in the end.

For Christians, Fasnet was the time before Lenten season begun – the last chance to act wild and free and to eat (and drink!) whatever one wants.

All this cumulates into nowadays Fasching season: The official start into what we also call the “fifth season” is on November 11 at 11:11 am. But the main celebrations happen in the week before Ash Wednesday so their dates depend on Eastern and vary from year to year.

Here is an overview over the most important Fasching dates in 2020:

• Weiberfasching (the day when women take over, storm the city hall and cut men’s ties): February 20
• Rosenmontag (the day of the big Fasching parade): February 24
• Faschingdienstag (last chance to go wild): February 25
• Aschenmittwoch (start of Lent, time to go to church): February 26

Fasching in Stuttgart: dates, parties, parades

There is a lot going on during Fasching season in Stuttgart. I will now point what I think are the main events:

• February 8: Husarenball at Bürgerforum in
• February 13: Faschingsparty at Classic Rock Café
• February 20: Küblesrennen in Bad Cannstatt
• February 22: Karnevalsshow at SSB Veranstaltungszentrum Waldau
• February 24: Faschingsumzug through downtown Stuttgart
• February 25: Faschingsrave at ToY Club
• February 29: Expat Fasching Party

For an overview over the most events that are going on during Fasching in Stuttgart visit this website.

Parties for kids

February 9: Kinderfasching at Österfeldhalle in Stuttgart-Vaihingen
February 16: Kinderfasching at Kursaal Bad-Cannstatt
February 16: Kinderfasching at Hohensteinschule Zuffenhausen
February 24: Kinderfasching at Stuttgarter Rathaus

Fasching in Stuttgart: Do’s and Don’ts

In order to have a great time celebrating Fasching in Stuttgart, there are some do’s and don’ts you should know about:

Do’s

• Dress up, dance, laugh and have fun!
• As the weather can be quite cold make sure you’re wearing something warm when you’re watching the parade.
• Bring cash, epay and even credit cards are not accepted everywhere.

Don’ts

• Flirting is fine, touching others without their permission not so much.
• Don’t pee in public, you’ll get fined.
• Don’t leave your waste on the streets. Put it in the bins provided.
• Drink responsibly.
• Don’t drive when you’ve had a few.

Fasching in Stuttgart: In need of a costume?

You want to visit a Fasching party but have nothing to wear? There is a fun shop for costumes in downtown Stuttgart called Deiters.

If you’re in a hurry, you’ll definitely find something on amazon.com. These are my favorite costumes this year [affiliate links]:

Transparecy: This article contains unpaid advertisements. In this post I point out events and locations that I can recommend personally. I did not get paid by the organizators to do so. Paid contend is always highlighted as such on Living in Stuttgart.

Picture credits: canva.com

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