Thanksgiving Weekend is well underway in Canada and like many Canadians abroad, I’ve appropriated the holiday in my new country. In typical Thanksgiving fashion, we hosted a small dinner for a few friends last night and went to bed with (too) full bellies. Still stuffed from the night before, we spent much of the morning and early afternoon watching YouTube videos. My boyfriend wanted to revisit shows he watched when he was growing up and ended up putting on this video.

It sort of struck me that we were watching this account of growing up in post-war Germany while we were so full from the night before that we couldn’t even eat breakfast. If Thanksgiving is a time to feel thankful, I sure did feel thankful. By today’s standards, we don’t have a lot of money, but when I thought about it, I realized how incredibly rich we are. We have a secure roof over our heads. We have enough to eat and if we put a little bit aside, we can even throw a feast every once in a while. We have relatively nice clothes in very good condition and can replace them when they break. We live in an incredibly stable place with great access to education, health care, and social support. We might feel some ups and downs, but compared to most people throughout history, we pretty much live like royalty. I also definitely feel lucky that I didn’t have to endure the aftermath of a war.

This video isn’t as lighthearted as the others that I’ve posted so far, but I didn’t set out to make “German Video of the Week” a slamfest on Schlager culture. I wanted to post the various facets of German culture. This is definitely part of the history here and it’s an interesting thing to watch. It’s in German, but if you’re learning, it’s fairly easy to understand. The program was intended for children, so the language is straightforward. If you don’t speak German, I still recommend watching it. I think you can probably follow a lot of it through the visual parts of the show.