Advent wreath

It's the first Sunday in Advent, so we lit the first candle in our advent wreath.  The Christmas market in Erlangen opened Friday, and we bought the wreath along with our other christmas supplies during the times between drinking Glühwein (hot spiced wine) and eating roasted chestnuts.

Although there is evidence of pre-Christian Germanic peoples using wreathes with lit candles during the cold and dark December days as a sign of hope in the future warm and extended-sunlight days of Spring, the first documented used of an advent wreath is a relatively new compared to Christmas trees and their ornaments (see http://cardinaltrees.blogspot.de/2010/12/chrstmas-ornaments-in-lauscha-germany.html). The first advent wreath was bigger than today's.  Back in 1833, a Lutheran pastor by the name of Johann Hinrich Wichern opened a Sunday school in Hamburg.  Each year the children would ask so often during advent if Christmas had arrived that, by 1839, he put a candle for every day of advent around a wagen wheel.  He lit one small candle each day except Sunday, when he lit a large candle.  Today, only the large candles remain in our advent wreaths.

This protestant custom spread in Germany to the Roman Catholic cathedral in Cologn in 1925, and in the 1930s it apeared in the U.S.