I like to joke that I married my husband because the apartment he was assigned at the university in Beijing, where we met, was equipped with hot water, a bathtub, and a refrigerator.  In truth however, I married him because he received care packages from Germany at Christmas.

They were carefully wrapped and thoughtfully chosen collections of chocolate, gingerbread, marzipan, and home baking. His landlady even sent an entire Linzertorte, a cake that fortunately improves with age, through the diplomatic pouch. The first care packages – in the signature yellow cardboard boxes of the German post office - arrived in time for the beginning of Advent or the Feast of St. Nicholas on December 6. Another set usually arrived in time for Christmas. Since both his mother and aunt were looking after him from afar, he was already getting double rations. But as soon as he announced that he had met a young lady, the size of the care packages increased. By Easter, they were sending two of everything.

The other Germans on campus were also being spoiled by their families. I remember being in the student dormitory – Building 6 – when Christine from Berlin and Astrid from Hannover opened their care packages and shared the contents with a party of friends gathered for the celebration. Bars of Milka chocolate, Ritter Sport, solid chocolate Santas, jars of Nutella and instant coffee, bags of gummy bears, and even loaves of stollen, or Christmas cake, spilled out of their lovingly wrapped packages to shrieks of delight and hectic gorging. It was 1987 and the selection of food at the cafeteria of our university was dismal in winter. Eggs and tomatoes, fried potato with bits of fatty pork and green pepper, fried aubergine, and the ubiquitous Chinese cabbage topped the menu in winter. Breakfast consisted of steamed dumplings stuffed with either meat or red bean. We weren’t starving, but by December all of us were craving chocolate. Besides, these students – among the first generation of foreign students in China to study Sinology - were paying to live in pretty desperate conditions. Their dorm rooms had poured concrete floors, metal beds, and rickety, ill-fitting casement windows. The washrooms on each floor had cold running water in trough-like sinks and squat toilets. The hallways were dimly lit with bare lightbulbs. Trash was swept to one dark corner of the hallway. The doors to the building were locked at 12:00 p.m. Hot showers could be taken once or twice a week at the public showers.

Into this scene then, imagine the comfort and joy that Swiss chocolate or mother’s baking can bring. Since then I have learned to bake the nutty half-moon biscuits with lemon drizzle that my husband’s mother perfected, and Linzertorte, prepared according to his landlady’s handwritten instructions and complete with a dash of schnaps in the mix,  is now a standard in my recipe canon.

I was listening to SWR2 on a Sunday morning recently and was delighted to discover that their subject was one that the media often ignores but which i adore: sewing. It is one outcome of the economic crisis: consumers are tired of same old same old Kleenex clothes that are disposed of after a couple of washings.  In the U.K. sales of sewing machine are up. In Germany homesewing courses are booked solid and at the ethnic markets in Berlin people are snapping up fabrics for 50 cents a meter.

My mother would smile. No, laugh. Even when she travels, she is never without needle and thread. She spent the month of March in Victoria, British Columbia and before she left she told me that she had packed a large board to use as a work surface for her quilting projects (“I just lay it on the luggage rack.”)  My mother was always economical. She made diapers for her many babies from the cotton sacks in which 50 pound bags of flour were delivered. We wore “Pure Canadian Wheat”  on our bottoms. She also made most of our outer clothing as well. Some of the best items that I remember were the birdcage bathing suit that she made for me and the “paper” dresses that she made for my younger sister and me. Not Kleenex dresses, these were made from a brightly printed papery cotton. We didn’t go to pre-school or kindergarten or daycare – we were homeschooled in making dolls clothes.  

Mom sewed on a heavy, but rather dainty black Singer sewing machine that she got when she married in 1945. My sisters and I all learned to sew by hand, and then on this machine. I had it with me at university in Montréal, by which time Mom had bought a new one for herself. I sewed long, narrow, six panel skirts from a Vogue pattern, one in black velvet with pin prick dots, godets flaring at the hem. Or another in fine Italian wool with kick pleats. My favorite fabric store was a tiny boutique called Au Long Metrage in Outremont. But sometimes my girlfriend Robin, another sewing fanatic, and I would enter the bargain basement of Fabricland in search of two-for-one offers on patterns.

My sister and I spent entire summers competing for the use of the Singer, she whipping up Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls, or stuffed toys. She once even cut up a vintage beaver skin coat to make a jacket. We made pinafore tops, wrap skirts, and apron dresses. It was the 70’s. The nearest fabric store was in the next village, 11 miles away. Sometimes we biked the distance just to buy fabric for new skirts or dresses with our babysitting money.

When my sisters and I graduated from university, we each received not a car or a trip to Europe, but a sewing machine. Actually, not quite. I got a loan to travel to China where a teaching job awaited me. I bought my first sewing machine there, a treadle machine. That was all that Beijing’s finest markets had in the late 1980’s. I laid out and cut my Chinese silks on the long tables in the reading room of the university library after hours. And when we came to Germany, I got the machine I have now – a Pfaff brand. It was important to me then that my new machine have a buttonhole function. Until then, I had been making them by hand.

When it came time to learn German, I found easy ways – by reading sewing instructions. But that is a topic for the next post!