German genes, that's what me and Royden have. Between the two of us we have a lot of them, heck we may even be distant cousins. You laugh, but when our good friend David married our cousin Kristy we found out that grandma Mary was from the same European village as David's grandfather. So...it's a small world.
Our grandparents and great grandparents had some pretty amazing stories to tell about their life experiences. Several of them endured displacement from Poland to Russia during the second World War and endured much hardship. Eventually they immigrated to Canada. Thankfully some of them wrote out their life stories, which I really need to read again.
Our German grandparents have given us a very good heritage and we have much to be thankful to them for. The greatest legacy they left was their faith in Jesus, which they passed down to us. That makes me think of Proverbs 22:6 'Train a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not turn from it'. We praise the Lord for the gift of our grandparents!
Our German relatives also passed down a few other things to us including: the need for clean, a tendency toward stubborness, a taste for halva and a strange love of...saurkraut. And that my friends is what inspired this post. I decided to turn our meal during community group last night into an Oktoberfest party. FYI community group is code for bible study...so if we ever invite you over for an Oktoberfest party with our community group look out for the bait a switch!
Meet Helga. Fortuntely she was only at our party in spirit. I would say our bent for beer was not something passed down with those genes...but I do recall a particular grandmother with a penchant for the dark stuff. She might not appreciate me blowing her cover but it can't be that bad if monks invented the stuff and Martin Luther let his wife run a brewery eh?
So there you have it. Of course some of our friends weren't too keen on the fermented cabbage. Good thing I didn't tell them the stories about how back in the day when Royden's family made it they would let the freshly bathed little ones jump around in the cabbage in the tub as part of the canning proccess!
Since you're supposed to listen to German music at an Oktoberfest party we subjected our friends 'Fettes Brot' the only German music I had. It's rap and we had to skip all the songs with English since it seems they only know English expletives. I can't judge them since the only German word I know is schiesser and I use it often enough that Royden regrets that he ever taught it to me. He has been known to remind me not to say it in front of his many relatives who still speak German. "You know it's still a real swear word right?". Uh huh.
I can forgive those who loathe saurkraut...since I used to be one of them. I thought I'd try to make it up to them by plying them with this:
The key ingredient in this:
I think they left happy.
