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December, 2005 - Nr. 12

 

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St. Nicholas and Servant Ruprecht

  by Peter Klein

I don’t know if you ever met St. Nicholas and his servant, Ruprecht, in your home. They visited my sisters and brothers and me on the sixth of December each year in our home in Germany.

Their appearance was always a surprise to me, since at that period of my life I was always busy with the games I played with the other children or the adventures of my own, created by me. A gift of the children is that, they say. This is probably so because the adults insist that these are altogether nothing but absurd pictures of the imagination, which had been drummed into their heads by other adults, which again other adults had... etc.

What I wanted to convey to you, is, that in the universe of my childhood time did not exist as a reality. Only if connected to a disagreeable subject like school, or so, was time forced upon me as an important fact of daily life. This does not mean, by far, that I accepted it as a reality of mine. To my dismay I followed the same line as that of other adults: somewhere in time I exchanged their knowledge against mine and took over their idea about time as the right one. Yet until today I know that as a child I was closer to the truth about the framework of the cosmos than in my later years. That is why I am spending much of my time nowadays to regain the lost ground of yesteryear.

Maybe that makes it clear to you why the visit of St. Nicholas surprised me, always.

It was that time of year, when the darkness came upon us much earlier than during the rest of the year, which was quite often the cause that we had to brake off our outside games prematurely and not to our liking. The day ended as usual as we, the children, scrubbed ourselves clean from top to bottom. The favourite game of the season for us was that we piled up a big mountain of leaves and with a hop and a jump we dived into it head first. Which was supposedly, in the opinion of our parents, connected with lust and dirt. Luckily my sisters, brothers and I loved water and soap, because we had managed to make even a game out of this without getting on the wrong side of our parents.

That’s how we sat on that evening, polished with red cheeks and in our pyjamas, at the dining room table. We had just shoved the last bite into our mouths when a thumbing could be heard from the front door. "Bong! Bong!" it sounded. Mother rushed to the door and opened it quickly. There he stood: the mighty figure of St. Nicholas with his red-white suit and hood and his full white beard, dressed just the same as your Santa Claus who is so familiar to you. In his right hand he held a big black book. Already he stomped toward us children as we stood undeterredly in the middle of the room and stared at him transfixed and wide eyed. Another figure followed him, bent over, carrying a big sack on his shoulder. Knecht RuprechtThis was the Servant Ruprecht. He was dressed in a brown cowl and from the belt of his cowl hang a bunch of twigs all tied together. Because of that bunch of twigs he was not very much liked by children. Thus we paid very little attention to him.

Our eyes were glued to St. Nicholas, who had just opened his big black book, and he started to read from it, to each child individually listing the bad and then the good deeds they had done since his last visit. In his closing remarks he announced his decision that on account of the good deeds outweighing the bad deeds the child deserved a gift instead of the going over with the bunch of twigs. So he went from brother to sister until he finally turned to me. And always, when he read off my bad deeds, there were one or two among those, which caused me to question myself: "How could he possibly know about them?" "When I kicked that football past the goal into the neighbour’s rosebush and broke off several roses in the course of the event, I assured myself with great care, that I had been observed by nobody," I wondered deeply. I wondered so deeply about it that I heard the rest of his speech as if from far away. Finally I saw Servant Ruprecht open the big sack and fish a parcel out of it. This he gave to St. Nicholas and he in turn handed it to me with a face full of laughter.

As the two had stomped in with a great hello, that’s how they stomped out of our home. And I breathed a big sigh of relief.

The gifts I have completely forgotten about, except for that open toy convertible with its stick shift, but I still wonder to this day about the broken off roses.

Where St. Nicholas and his servant Ruprecht came from, I couldn’t tell you, because I myself did never find out.

 

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