Postings from Germany

A Shoe Tree

Maybe you have one, a place where the shoes are kept together in some organized way. We have two, sort of.  One you'd call a shoe bag - it's hanging on the wall in our bedroom and the shoes have little compartments.  And in the back room downstairs, where we often come into the house, there's a shoe rack where we keep the shoes we wear most often and the sandals or slippers that we wear around the house.  Handy, a shoe thingy.

Or maybe you have those devices you put in a shoe so it stays in shape.  That's a shoe tree, too, I'm told, but we don't have any.

And then there's a different sort of shoe tree I've seen here and I've seen more than just a few.  They're usually out in the countryside and often at a place where the locals would have a party.  Somewhere in my head, there was a connection to weddings, but I couldn't pull it out.  This is the one we saw last weekend when we were biking back from Sunday Brunch.

It does catch your eye!  Shoes nailed to a tree!

I got curious - again - about this custom.  Googling didn't find me the answer I was looking for, so I started calling around.

What? What? Shoes nailed to a tree? Why?
Well, that's what I'm asking you - you're the German!
I don't know, I've never have seen such a thing. Are you sure??
YES!!  I have pictures to prove it!

There's always an answer.  My answer lady was Claudia, Christoph's partner:

When a couple decides to get married, they set a date and then the night before the wedding there is a "Polterabend" - a wedding eve party - and friends come to a party and  when they arrive, they throw pottery or crockery against the wall. Then they eat and drink and play games.  Breaking the pottery is  supposed to bring good luck, but all the reasons I've read make no sense - that's tradition for you:  doing things that don't always make sense.

At midnight, the shoes of the bride-to-be are taken and nailed to a tree so that she knows she can't "wander" any more.  The corollary is that the bridegroom's pants are burned to assure the same.  I haven't seen any burned pants around.  Maybe they're buried in all the broken pottery!!