On the first weekend of Advent, the LVR Open-Air Museum Kommern offers an extraordinary Advent program that appeals to all the senses: traditional Christmas cookies from the museum ovens, arts and crafts, music and fairy tales, lantern tours and productions on the history of the Christmas tree invite you to marvel and experience.
Here you can experience how rural families prepared for Christmas. Pre-Christmas house music can be heard in the farmhouse parlors of the museum houses, encouraging you to sing together. The entire museum and the historic houses are bathed in a cozy light with natural light sources and lanterns and traditional stories are told. In the old chapel, guests also sing Advent songs together with the "farmer's wife". Children have the opportunity to make Christmas decorations and small gifts in the craft room. Meanwhile, grown-ups can practise traditional calligraphy for their Christmas cards in the old village school. The aroma of baked apples, speculoos and Printen biscuits, freshly prepared in front of the guests, wafts from the museum ovens. Hot chestnuts, honey cake and Feuerzangenbowle, which housekeepers offer in the Lower Rhine farmsteads, smell just as delicious. The many different craftspeople presenting their traditional skills also make for a unique experience: Experience how a broom is tied, how a blacksmith makes tools or how a wood carver works his wood. The lantern tours, which bathe the museum grounds in warm light, are particularly atmospheric. Finally, at the small Advent market in and in front of the Pingsdorf dance hall, you will find bag makers, bookbinders, hand-knitted items, freshly bound Advent wreaths and other treasures.
