Before the days family activities, Sharon and Chris got a chance to head into Mainz and wander the city center a little bit. With Chris’s dad Oliver in tow, we stopped by the freaky sculpture fountain in the city center and walked across the 50 deg North latitude line which happens to pass through the heart of Mainz (Europe is much farther north than the US). 
We circled the ancient Mainzer Dom (“Dom” = cathedral, started construction in year 975) which by luck started chiming its noon bells while we there. After a brief stop inside of the cathedral we moved on to the Saint Stephan church nearby. This church is also over a thousand years old but partially destroyed by bombing during World War II. During post war construction Marc Chagall was commissioned to do the main windows. Stunning.
Here’s a shot of the supposedly joyous Fastnachtsbrunnen fountain in the center of town. Fastnacht is a big holiday in Germany — it’s the counterpart to Mardi Gras, with “Crazy Days” occuring in the days just before Lent starts. Chris remembers attending the “Rosenmontag” parades in Mainz as a child, with candy being thrown from windows, wild costumes, and probably lots of drinking. This fountain though … looks eerily like Holocaust memorials we’ve seen.
We returned to Hechtsheim and Morschgasse (Winny and Marianne’s house) to meet up with family. Many of us then went to an afternoon Christmas Eve mass at the nearby church (more modest, only 200 years old), which was already standing room only when we arrived. Germany is a very Christian, very Catholic country — Martin Luther, the Reformation, and the current pope himself all hail from here.
Later … meals, presents, drinking! In the German tradition, gifts are opened on Christmas Eve, not the next morning. Each of us had been assigned a “secret Santa” and gave our gifts to each other. Complete chaos and joy reigned! 
Then we went back over to Heuerstrasse (Gisela and Helmut’s house) for dinner, noisily marching the five blocks carrying little candle-lit torches. All 25 of us fit into the beautifully decorated dining room for a huge meal of roast beef, turkey with tuna sauce and capers, avocados stuffed with shrimp, and much more. Here Cody and Jen demonstrate the proper way to drink plum schnapps. 
We have never seen so many different kinds of Christmas cookies.
At the stroke of midnight, everyone toasted Sharon’s birthday. More drinking! So many different kinds of alcohol!