October 23, 2012

• Our Adventures:  Fun in Frankenmuth!
  

  Every year, we go somewhere X-messy between Sukkot and Hanukkah.  It’s just a seasonal thing… like the three wise men traveled afar, so do we.  Last year we went to Charlton Park’s “Christmas Past”.  Another year we went to Crossroads Village.  And quite a few years, we’ve gone to Bronner’s CHRISTmas Wonderland in Frankenmuth.

  

  
  This is a HUGE, HUGE store.  The size of two Walmarts, likely.

  There’s a trick to Frankenmuth, and I’ll tell you what it is: the FIRST thing you do when you hit town is go to the restaurant and make a reservation for dinner.  Whether you decide on Zehnder’s (world’s largest family restaurant) or the Bavarian Inn… GO and get a reservation first.  Because come supper/lunch time?  It. Is. Packed.  The waits are insane.  You don’t want to do that – you want to walk right in, and the key is to go and make the reservation, THEN go to Bronners or downtown or wherever.  We did Zehnder’s last time, and decided to try the other one this year, so we went to the Bavarian Inn first, got our reservation in, and then took off for Bronners.

  
  Zehnder’s, for the record.  No kidding, it’s HUGE.

  Now… I have to be honest.  When I came out of Christianity, I threw out Christmas in a BIG way.  Then as the years went on, I realized that you CAN’T throw out X-mess.  You can’t.  Society won’t let you.  Your husband has the day off whether he wants it or not.  You are inundated with it on billboards, commercials, store ads, stores IN GENERAL… it’s freakin’ everywhere.  I understand why Atheists, Agnostics, Muslims, and basically anyone NOT christian hates christianity – because it’s forced on them, whether they want it or not.  Period.  The best you can do is to rearrange it to be less offensive.  Strip Messiah out of it, or better still focus on Hanukkah.  I’ve even had to add stuff in and count the time between Sukkot and X-mess as the ‘sojourn time’ of the 3 Kings, who didn’t actually see Yeshua until He was something like three years old.  (Three months from the start of the fall feasts to X-mess… it fits.  Mostly.)  The X-mess tree is now our Eyetz L’Chaim, Tree of Life.  It’s… pathetic, but we do try to honor Ha’Shem in spite of the paganism foisted upon us.  Luckily, since He created all things, it’s possible to turn it back ’round to Him.

  Bronner’s CHRISTmas Wonderland?  It’s like taking Christmas and mashing it in your own face like a pie.  And for the first few years after leaving Christianity, I hated Bronner’s.  I still don’t like them – the sum total of their Hanukkah stuff fits on an end aisle and is pathetic… and that pixxes me off.  Meanwhile, I think they have upwards to 750 nativities, between what’s for sale and what’s on display, and no, I’m not kidding you.  Which is why we try to get there in October, near Sukkot, if we can.  Less offensive, closer to the actual Birth.  But still completely garish and insane.  Wanna see?

  

  And that’s just the stuff ABOVE your head.  Note the racks are way down in bottom eighth of the picture.  It. Is. Cr-AZY there.  And packed.  It doesn’t matter WHAT time of the year it is, Bronners is busy.  And there are pictures on the wall of Wally Bronner with every known celebrity you can think of, pretty much.  From Marie Osmond to Ronald Reagan to Laura Bush to the Von Trapps to Doogie Hauser, M.D to Miss America.   They all have gone to Bronners, at one time or another.  It’s pretty amazing.

  

  We always go and spend about two hours looking around (and we still don’t look at it all), and we each get an ornament for our tree, and then one each for the penpals.  Sometimes we need something else – like glass icicles for the tree (cuz mine are old/brittle/broken) or garland (cuz mine was my mom’s and started to fall apart).  This year I got a few lighted snowflakes for the outside of the house.  I really actually wanted a lit Star of David, but apparently nobody makes those… so I’m going to get some heavy wire or thin rod and bend it, then wrap it with blue garland.  It can go between the two lit snowflakes on the house.  ((grins!))

  Last time we went all around the grounds, walking thru the statues and stuff.  This year, I wanted to take the kids up to the Silent Night Chapel.  Ugh, church (watch me rankle), but I thought it’d be educational.  The Silent Night Chapel is an exact replica of the one in Austria that stands on the site of the church where ‘Silent Night’ was first sung.  It’s… anticlimatic.  And tiny.  And I don’t like it, but we did it.  For posterity’s sake.

  What WERE interesting were the signs leading up to it.  They had ‘Silent Night’ in every language you can imagine, six on each side of the sign.  Of course I wanted to read it in Hebrew, but Isaac and Lydia were fascinated with the Braille.  Ethan and Aaron?  They just figured out that some of the rocks along the path were really speakers that played ‘Silent Night’, and they were checking out ALL the rocks to find out which were real and which were not.

     
   
  And yes, I was there, too.  I know you people get upset when I don’t put up at least ONE picture with me in it… so there Brian and I are.  Two hunnid pown don’t look too terrible when you’re five-foot-Amazon.  Besides, I’m down quite a bit, but you don’t get to find out until Thursday.  ((bwahahaha.))  By the way, those are NOT maternity jeans… I actually fit into my REAL jeans for this trip!  WoooooT!

  As we were leaving, we had a REAL treat – and what to our wondering eyes should appear but a jolly old man all in red with a beard!  Driving a snow-white car, I might add.  Santa?  I don’t know, but if it is, he’s looking mighty dapper, these days!!

  Then we drove downtown and parked on the other side of the covered bridge.  Frankenmuth has two hotels with massive waterpark hotels (Zehnder’s Splash Village and the Bavarian Inn), dozens of horse drawn carriages (watch where you step), and TONS of little shops with facades reminiscent of Bavaria – after all, Frankenmuth is called ‘Little Bavaria’.  Much beer and cheese and wine hauses, but fun little trinket places, fudge shops, toy shops… Brian actually likes walking downtown more than he likes Bronners, so we try to get there around two so that we have daylight for our wanderings.  But we always park so that we can walk across the covered bridge.  It’s very kewl.

  
  The covered bridge.  And the colors were still pretty, too!

  We walked further north than we ever have before – all the way up the hill to the Frankenmuth Brewery.  Brian said he wanted to see if we could get some mead, this year – in reading ‘An Island Story’ for history, we’ve come across mead quite a lot, and wine made from honey sounded intriguing, so we were on a mission to try to find mead.  Frankenmuth Brewery, btw, does NOT have it.  But it was kind of fun, seeing what was up the hill.

  Then we came back down and went in our usual shops – the Cheese Haus, the Woolen Merchant (I saw a quilt pattern that I am SO going to have to do for our bed… someday…), we watched them make taffy in the candy shop window, bypassed the toy shop (I refuse to go there – one year, 2-year old Aaron had to go potty, and was training, and couldn’t hold it long.  I asked if he could use their bathroom, and the witch who ran it wouldn’t let us… he was beside himself over that one, and if a TOY SHOP can’t let a little one use their potty, they can kiss my business goodbye).  But we love the Olde Tyme curiosity shop, and the jewelry merchant, and the little bakery under the tower.  I’ll be doing a ‘how fudge is made’ post in a few days – we spent quite a lot of time in the fudge shop, and walked away with four slabs (German Chocolate, Mint Swirl, Dark Chocolate, and Turtle.  Did you know chocolate has 13g fat in a 1″ cube, but fudge only has 1 gram in a 1″ cube?  It’s WAY better for you!  Besides… fudge!)

  This tower, below, is part of the Bavarian Inn.  There’s also a giant clock on the other side, with bells that chime out music, and that three times daily has a mechanical cuckoo-style story of the Pied Piper for kids to see.  Check out the picture to the right… that’s the Pied Piper and the bells.

  This is the entrance to the Bavarian inn.  Upstairs is the restaurant, and in the basement is a toy shop, a curiosity shop, a bakery, and the little wine merchant were we DID find our mead!  It’s fun walking around down there, too.  But I hope you’re getting a feel for what Frankenmuth is like.  Very Old Europe… like stepping into the past.  This is why it’s such a huge tourist trap.

  As we were headed upstairs, I heard an accordion, and wasn’t sure if it was canned music or an actual musician.  Imagine our delight when we saw that it was a woman actually playing the music!  We stopped to listen, and she was playing ‘  O Sole Mio’.  I don’t know the words in Italian (<< my new goal… for when this ghastly cold is done), but I know the English counterpart, so I started singing.  The accordion lady was so thrilled, she started singing along with me.  Could’ve been a beautiful duet, if it weren’t for the fact that my mom came over with illin’ triplets Thursday and got three out of seven of us sick with colds.  Still, it was fun, and my kids thought it was SOO kewl, their mom singing with the musician lady.  She was too happy to let me take her picture, too. This isn’t her own costume; all the employees at the Bavarian Inn – upstairs and down – wear this.

  Well, except for the guys.  They get the traditional lederhosen, and YES, I did take a picture of them in the restaurant.  Aren’t they cute?  Look at the socks!  So cute.  In an Old World kind of way, of course.

  It was, btw, very nice to bypass the long lines and get shown right to our table.  And you should know… the dinners at both Zehnder’s and the Bavarian Inn are NOT for the feint of heart.  They consist of traditional fruit/nut bread with marmalade, and chicken noodle soup.  Then an appetizer course arrives of tuna noodle salad, cole slaw, cranberry sauce and corn relish.  Then you move on to the meal, which is their famous chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, squash, and buttered noodles.  Then they bring you molasses cookies and ice cream (orange/vanilla swirl, pumpkin, orange, or vanilla).  I figured my weight challenge was SHOT for the day, but when I added in the 4+ hours of walking, I came out 32 calories to the good, even after eating ALL of the food, there!

  On the way home, we drove back thru Bronner’s – the store was closed and the parking lot empty, but everything was all lit up, so we took the drive down their ‘Christmas Lane’ to enjoy the displays.  It was fun – something I don’t remember doing, before.

  It’s a three hour (ish) drive to Frankenmuth from our house, but we make a great day’s adventure out of it, and have a lovely time!

  • 12:00 pm
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