Week 15 begins with C bringing home a really lovely piece of handarbeit that he has made: a hand made Advent Calendar, with biscuits and wood work. Only he drops part of it on the way home at lunchtime, not realising until he reaches the house, and is very distressed. I leave the two of them eating lunch and retrace his steps, finding the two missing pieces half way back to school – and luckily, they hadn’t been been run over by a car.
C’s German homework is beginning to appear difficult to me – he can’t manage it without help but I can’t help him. Luckily J works it out and between us we manage to muddle through it.
I bump into one of the neighbours and ask about Schulsilvester, as I’m still trying to figure out what it’s all about. She explains but it still sounds bizarre. So I look it up on t’internet, and this is the translated page:
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulsilvester&sa=X&oi=translate&resnum=1&ct=result&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dschulsilvester%26hl%3Den%26rls%3DRNWE,RNWE:2004-40,RNWE:en
It loses a lot in translation (!) but I think the basis is that it’s a specific Zurcher tradition for the final school day of the year, and the last one to arrive at school that morning gets paraded round the village in a night cap. Wonderful – ritual humiliation, Swiss style. That will be why the letter (the one that freaked me out last week) was making some reference to not getting to school earlier than 5am. Both people I have asked about it have made reference to all the door bells in the village being rung by school children.
So it looks as if we batten down the hatches and disconnect the doorbell on that Thursday night. Bizarre.
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