St Nicholas will visit our house tonight in anticipation of his feast day tomorrow. In the hall, he will find a row of polished shoes and in them he will leave new socks filled with sweets and small gifts.
It is a little puzzling for my children that he doesn't visit their friends' houses. But it can be explained. For four years now, our family has been enriched at Christmas by the company of young German women, - four au pairs - and their customs and their saint have followed them here.
When the debate about how Irish society should develop turned into an argument this summer over whether we should emulate Boston or Berlin, I reflected on the experience of having a little bit of Germany in our home. I know that four young people do not represent a scientific sample of German youth, but four is sufficient to make some generalisations.
What have these youngsters, aged 19 or 20 and generally in their first year out of school, had in common? For a start, there's their excellent English - what a superb education system the Germans have. Then there's their giftedness - several talented artists, a stunning pianist. Their social concern - one taught troubled children to ride horses, another devoted a voluntary year to caring for disabled adults. Their sense of fun and desire to learn about our culture - they dressed up at Hallowe'en, trekked to mountains and monasteries, learned the tin whistle and Irish dancing.
I have learnt much from these young women's frugality, their lack of materialism and their concern for the planet. Despite their observance of the feast of St Nicholas, they have not been conventionally religious - but they are undoubtedly spiritual.
These young Germans love the Earth. They worship Landschaft - visiting the Cliffs of Moher or the Giant's Causeway has the status of a pilgrimage, and these places bring tears to their eyes. They believe in protecting the environment - every time I accept yet another plastic bag, I think of Franzi's disapproving gaze, although she is long back in Berlin. When I lit the fire the other day with those plastic-wrapped firelighters, Dani said in quiet disbelief: "You are allowed to burn plastic here? We are not in Germany."
My young German friends make birthday and Christmas presents, painstakingly and quietly: a large gingerbread man; a knitted hand puppet; a sketch or painting. They make Christmas cards, paint their own wrapping paper. To a woman, they have been appalled by the Irish attitude to Advent.
In Germany, they tell me, Advent is a special time. Each Sunday, they light another candle in their Advent wreath and sit with family and friends by the fire eating home-made biscuits and listening to music. They observe the way we in the Republic spend our Sundays before Christmas. Steaming through traffic jams en route to shopping centres to acquire more large lumps of non-biodegradable plastic with which to fill our homes. In Germany, shops stay shut on Sundays.
So, Boston or Berlin? I have had the great good fortune to spend time in both cities and would far rather not choose.
Boston has been home to many family members, off and on. Where can beat a city with the Charles River, Walden Pond, Faneuil Hall, Harvard, MIT, and the wonderful Museum of Science where my children stood in awe before tyrannosaurus rex this summer?
I spent a student summer in Berlin, working in the packing department of a pharmaceutical factory. This was long before the fall of the Wall, but even then there was a sense that here was one of the great crossroads not just of European but of world civilisation. When West Berlin was an island in the eastern state, the Kurfurstendamm hummed, the sense of intellectual and cultural ferment was intoxicating. On a trip to the east, I marvelled at the old Reichstag buildings and museum complex.
I must so far rely on others' accounts to visualise how the two cities have become one, but I note it was in Berlin that 200,000 people marched against racism last month on the anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogrom of the Jews.
The Boston versus Berlin debate is not about architecture or museums or great universities. At its narrowest, it is an argument about which ingredients lead to economic success; more widely, it is about what kind of society you build with the gains from that success.
Would you rather live in a society where two weeks' or six weeks' annual holiday is the norm? Would you rather live in a society where a sizeable minority has no health cover or one in which healthcare is provided free to all? More fundamentally, what value do you put on the survival of the Earth?
The US behaved abominably in the discussions on global warming which collapsed at The Hague 10 days ago. Despite emitting a quarter of the world's greenhouse gases, it was willing to trade not one jot of its wealth for the future of the planet. "EU, stay strong", environmentalists chanted, and the EU did.
If what hangs in the balance is the survival of your great-grandchildren, would you rather live in a society which exchanges home-made gifts at Christmas or one which will not curb its reckless consumerism?
Sorry, Boston, if I must choose: Ich bin ein Berliner.
