So it turns out there is a Halloween in Germany. Of sorts.

It happens on the night of Dec. 6 in Catholic areas of the country and is supposed to commemorate whatever bishop or saint Dec. 6 (Nikolaus) commemorates. What's supposed to happen is that all the kids studying for confirmation dress up, walk around the neighborhood, ring doorbells and sing carols. They are then rewarded with candy.

What actually happens is that about half of all the kids in the neighborhood dress up but every one of them (Confirmation or no) all ring, sing and receive. Since we were in deepest, darkest, Catholic Germany the weekend of Dec. 6, Cy and Martha got to participate. They were happy to dress up but their cousins refused. Though I've never done Halloween with my kids, this felt exactly the way Halloween felt. We hung back while the kids did their thing. Some people would ask the kids who they were and where they lived while other people just listened to the song and handed out treats.

Most of the houses went to some trouble to put together little treat packets with gingerbread cookies while others just wrapped up a couple euros in napkins.

Sabine and her brother wouldn't let me offer to sing in exchange for a bottle of beer or a quick nip of schnapps.

They still don't think I was serious.

I'm not much into Thanksgiving anymore. It used to be a nice thing when my close friends would come over and it wasn't as much about the food as about the company -- like how Thanksgiving is supposed to be.

But now lots of my close friends have moved away (or were on vacation) and suddenly I was calling anyone who might want to stop by for turkey and mashed potatoes. Since this ultimately is pretty pedestrian fare, Thanksgiving gets dull when it's about the food. But this year it was more than that. It also leaves an odd taste in my mouth celebrating the prelude to genocide, direct or indirect. I guess it's semantics but maybe we could go back to a harvest fest. I don't know.

Living where I do I well know that I can do little about the past. Beyond Thanksgiving, I sometimes find myself struggling with Germany's past. Simple logic seems to say that living here is a kind of endorsement of days gone by. I find myself considering this each time I bump into one of these gold plaques. They list the name of Nazi victims who used to live in an adjacent building. Leo Goldstein lived in Sredzkistrasse when it was still named Franseckystrasse. It's not just the names and dates and visualizing these people being torn from their lives that gets me. It's also the fact that they say where the people died. This almost brings me to tears, which is the point, I suppose.

Sabine and I are open with the kids about what these plaques mean. They have a vague idea of the war and now even The Wall.

It's a cliche that you can't escape the wars here (real and cold) but it ends up in places you don't expect. Like child-rearing. Or even when buying an apartment -- we had to look at our title for some reason recently and discovered the Nazis took it from a Jew who lived in Kassel (Sabine's hometown). You could then see when East Germany got ahold of it.

Do I add a "genocide" keyword to this?