Birthday on St Nicolas' Day

St Nicolas Day, December the 6th, is not widely celebrated in France. It's mostly a tradition in the north-east, close to Germany, where my Mom is from. St Nicolas, who died on a December 6th,  is said to have resurrected three children a butcher had killed. Believe it or not, there is a children's song about that story that my Mom would make us sing along with our Christmas songs.  She used to tell us that when when she was young St Nicolas would come and give children presents if they had been nice but he was accompanied by the Père Fouettard, (Hans Trapp in her language- Alsatian, the Whipping Father in English) who was supposed to whip children who had not been nice. They would go all around her town and one year as she heard them coming, she went to hide under the table...I still wonder why...

When you see the picture, you can easily see the link with Santa...
The other big tradition where my Mom grew up is ginger bread. I remember that one of my aunts (Tatie Cathy) would send us ginger bread stuff every year because like I said,  you couldn't find all this in the west. I used to wish it was a chocolate tradition instead, since I don't really like ginger bread (I only like Prosper Youplaboum, that is not specially made for December and that you can find everywhere in France, but I haven't seen him here...)

Above, the ginger bread we would get

Below, the ginger bread I will eat

They do have ginger stuff here in December too, pre-made kits to build a house or something else. I remember doing it with the Young Women one time. It makes me think of the houses we would build with my sisters from a recipe called Dame Tartine. It's not a pre-made kit, we would do it from scratch and we wouldn't do it at a specific time of the year, just when we thought we wanted to.

Anyway, since I've been here I have combined the traditions and now I build something for St Nicolas Day on December 6th. I don't make it out of ginger bread, since I don't like it. This year I decided to build a train, so I made a Yule log, brownies and cookies. Keld assembled the whole thing and Julia (who also helped to bake) decorated it.

Since December 6th is also Aunt Alli's birthday, we put candles on it before we sang.

I first met Alli at our wedding but I had seen a picture of her before, this picture:

Happy Birthday Aunt Alli!!!!!!!!!!!!