Stories
Longer reads from the chronicle: the people, the trades and the customs that the chapters can only mention in passing. Every date in them comes from a source, listed at the end of each story.
All stories
Why the miners longed for light
In midwinter, many Erzgebirge miners went down before dawn and came up after dark. What the record says about their light, and the story the mountains tell about it.
Title page of Georgius Agricola, De re metallica (Basel: Froben, 1556), public domain; scan: Mining Heritage, via Wikimedia Commons Agricola’s Book of Mines
A town doctor in a silver boomtown spent twenty-five years on the great book of mining. It was printed after his death, refused a grave in his own city, and translated into English by a future American president.
How the nutcracker came to America
A carved nut-biter from the German mountains, a king from Seiffen, a ballet that bored its first audience, and a Christmas Eve in San Francisco. How the nutcracker became an American Christmas.
How Seiffen’s toys went out into the world
A linen trader’s wheelbarrow, merchants in the middle, crates on the Spanish silver fleet and four turners at a Dresden Christmas market. How a mountain village’s toys reached the world, and what they earned the families who made them.
Of smoke and incense cones
Frankincense against the spirits of the twelve nights, a dough of charcoal and beech flour, a kitchen in Crottendorf and a turner’s idea about pipes. The story of the smoker and the little cone that makes him smoke.
The Bergparade: miners in their Sunday best
Every Advent, more than a thousand men and women in black parade dress march through Annaberg-Buchholz. How a royal wedding of 1719 dressed the Saxon miner, and how the parades survived to the present.