Many a visitor to Germany will have come across its all-year-round Christmas shops, filled with painted wooden figures, but very few ever make it to the remote fold in the nation’s eastern hills where most of

these figures are made. This is Seiffen, a village in the Ore (Erzgebirge) Mountain range south of Dresden, where it lines the border with the Czech Republic.

Despite their name, these ‘mountains’ don’t get much higher than 500 metres, so the Ore is primarily farming and forestry country, dotted with barns and hamlets. Seiffen is one of its biggest settlements, and there are some 130 individual workshops here, most small, but a couple of them employing over 50 people. Instead of farming, Seiffen’s villagers spend their days sandpapering angel’s wings and putting the moustaches on wooden policemen. Nutcrackers are a local speciality, as are angels, pyramids, arches, and smoking men.

Mining man

Amongst the community’s creations there’s one dominant figure, often dressed in red, who looks like a soldier, but is actually a miner in ceremonial dress. That’s because the former wealth of these hills is under the ground, and the carvers’ ancestors were originally carpenters in the local gold and silver mines. As the mining industry faded – Seiffen’s last closed in 1849 – these carpenters experimented with timber offcuts in their spare time. Back then, they were mainly for community gift-giving: a symbolic figure of a miner in ceremonial uniform traditionally celebrated the birth of a boy, a guardian angel celebrated a girl. These figures became so much part of local lore that they are even found decorating the interior of Seiffen’s very pretty pointy-hatted church.

Today, up to 800 different products are made locally, and a couple of big enterprises in town are obvious tourist attractions for visitors, offering workshop tours: they are Seiffener Volkskunst, at the entry to the village, and Richard Glässer on Haupstrasse, the biggest enterprise in town with 80 employees. Both have copious shops that are a twinkly treasury of fairy-lit carvings, and beyond Glässer’s retail section, a doorway leads into a workshop spread across three floors. Here a series of production lines of disembodied heads and torsos smelling of paint, glue and sawdust are carefully scrutinized by local ladies wielding fine-tipped paintbrushes.

The Seiffen best-sellers are the nutcrackers, actually miners in ceremonial costumes with lever-operated jaws; various styles of pyramid, rotating constructions topped with fans and with nativity figures below; and Schwibbogen candle-lit arches, most commonly seen as eyebrows of light in household windows all over Europe.

For an outsider, the output of this overgrown village may seem both expensive and un-Teutonically kitsch, but when you know the mining backstory, and how everything is still made by hand and not in China, it all begins to make sense.

I’m not sure where locals go to buy milk and bread in the town of Seiffen, not far from the Czech border in Saxony, because as far as I could see the entire place is devoted to the manufacture and sale of hundreds of little wooden figures. Accordingly, a visit there is an astonishing and rather surreal experience.

There are literally dozens of shops, large and small devoted to all things wooden and German. Prices for this Erzgebirge Holzkunst (woodcraft from the Erzgebirge, or Ore Mountains) range from a few to many thousands of Euros for complex and sometimes frighteningly large models. Nearly all are made locally with several workshops in and around the town.

I believe the current industry developed from people in the 18^th century supplementing their income by making wooden toys and figures in the winter months, rather in the way that cuckoo clocks came into being in the Black Forest. These toys and figures proved popular with travellers and the trade spread and grew into an important industry and a major employer in the region. There is a museum in the town that tracks this development.

On a personal note, I discovered that a box of wooden bricks I played with as a child and branded from a UK retailer was almost certainly made in the area – I saw an almost identical set in the museum which had been made during the DDR times in the 1950s.

A lot of the production is aimed at Christmas Markets around the country. Personal favourites are the little Christmas advent models with a windmill on top driven by the warm air from the lighted candles beneath. With just one candle lit, the figures rotate slowly but by Christmas Day the kings and shepherds are racing around the crib scene with dizzying speed. Enchanting.

There are many different styles of figures but perhaps the most remarkable place for them is the hushed interior of the Wendt and Kuhn shop where the reverence with which the figures are treated might seem funny, but actually feels sincere and captivating. Tiny, and beautifully made, angels playing trumpets and little girls carrying flowers are presented in cabinets as if they were fine jewellery. There is a film that shows how the figures are made and if you indicate that you would like to buy one, the assistant places four choices of that figure in front of you. You then inspect them closely and select the one with the individually painted expression you like the best.

We parted with quite a lot of money.

Skiing in its Alpine form is a very expensive holiday. Skiing in its east German form is quite a different story, for the ski resorts in the Ore Mountains (Erzgebirge) in Saxony and in Thuringia are amongst the cheapest in Europe, and certainly the best value in Germany.  In the Ore Mountains, whose main resort Oberwiesenthal is the highest town in Germany at 914 metres, you can get a six-day package with accommodation, food and ski pass, for as little as €219 per person. And in the Thuringian forest a four-night package for cross-country skiers, including meals and baggage transfer along the route, costs from €180.

Of course higher prices is just one of the consequences to committing to an Alpine skiing holiday. There are others. Usually you are incarcerating yourself in a purpose-built (ie ugly) community, high up in the mountains, where skiing is practically the only occupation on offer. What happens if you don’t like it? You get tired of it? Or one of you gets injured? Too bad. You’re stuck in your mountain fastness for a week, and you’ll just have to grin and bear it, and watch others having fun while your cash drains away.

On the other hand, the lower altitude of this east German skiing can mean that the snow is far less reliable. Accordingly it’s a destination for shorter stays and last-minute decisions, and for people who want to mix skiing with other activities for a broader-based stay.

A former training ground for GDR skiers

Of the two key regions, Thuringia is mainly undulating forest, and so is best for cross-country skiing and tobogganing, with a bit of downhill thrown in. The resorts are tiny – Oberhof is one of the biggest and only has four lifts – but then this is also Germany’s cultural triangle, so there’s lots to see and learn about Goethe, Luther, Bach etc, and an array of castles such as the imperial Wartburg to see, along with the city of Weimar, which has no fewer than 16 UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

The Ore Mountains (Erzgebirge), particularly the Fichtelberg above Oberwiesenthal, were once the key training area for GDR skiers, and remain a favourite destination for athletes intent on competing in the Biathlon (cross country skiing plus rifle shooting). As it is on the border with the Czech Republic, Oberwiesenthal’s clientele is interestingly mixed and this keeps the prices down.  There’s a sufficient array of downhill slopes served by the seven lifts to keep an unambitious skier occupied for a couple of days.

Airport access is from Dresden, which helps make a strong case for coming here. The rebuilt city has a gruelling but interesting history, great architecture, opera and art galleries, and a superb location on the banks of the river Elbe. Plus the brand new, ground-breaking Military History Museum.

Information on the Fichtelberg ski resort

Oberwiesenthal packages

Contact for Thuringia Tourism