Hello, A Bavarian Krippe is a manger scene that is not just limited to the stable and the baby Jesus, etc.. When I was a child my father put up a Bavarian Krippe every year. Here is how he did it. He would build a waist-high platform along one wall of the living room and even sometimes around a corner. On top of the platform he would take old hunks of slag (residue from factory furnaces, I guess) and built mountains with them. He left flat places for meadows and in the center he would put the stable so that it was surrounded by the mountains. Then he would wind Christmas lights around the entire thing. Lights peeping out from caves in the mountains and so on. About a week earlier, he would go out in the woods somewhere and gather beautiful moss in several boxes. I helped him with that. He took the moss and worked it into the crevasses made by the slag and then covered the flat places with more moss so that it looked like mountains and meadows. Just beautiful! Then he took his old figures of people, farm animals, wild animals and the soap carvings that he had made himself - of castles, fairy tale characters, etc. and set them around in the appropriate places in the Krippe. He took his nativity set of soap-carved figures and placed them in the stable and hung the swinging angel from the ceiling with thread and a cut rubber band so it would bounce a little. On the lower part of the Krippe, he would have another shelf-like area - the outside of which he covered with cardboard and painted. He cut holes through the cardboard and made it look like a train tunnel. Then he set up the old Lionel train to travel around the lower shelf (most of which one couldn't see) and go in and out of the tunnel. He had a watchman that came out of his metal house everytime the train crossed a certain part of the track. Of course, this was more for the children. The main part of the Krippe was the mountains, meadows and stable. All the neighborhood children were invited to come to see the Krippe during the holidays. After they grew up, these children often reminded me of my Dad's Krippe. This was my Dad's version of a Bavarian Krippe. I would guess that any person building one would have their own way of decorating it. I build one every year too but mine is not as large as my father's was. But I have the moss and the train (mine is a mini that runs on a track through my mountains). The old soap carvings have disintegrated and I have my own figures to put into the meadows and mountains I build. My grandchildren help me by populating the meadows with my figures (that is their domain!). It's a wonderful tradition. It takes time and effort but is worth it. Kind regards, Mary Ann > Hi all, > > Having known little about my Bavarian roots until recently, I am wondering, > what is a Bavarian Krippe? Some type of ornamental/religious decoration for > Christmas? > > I really should have known I was Bavarian all along, considering my fondness > for Bavarian cream filling........:-) > > Thanks to anyone who can shed some light on this for me, > Joanne > > > ==== BAVARIA Mailing List ==== > Sister or Brother, > Can you spare $10 dollars to support Rootsweb? > http://www.rootsweb.com/rootsweb/how-to-subscribe.html#personal > --- Mary Ann Allen wallen@pipeline.com The Gathering Place http://sites.netscape.net/murrallen/homepage