Der Stollen 2020 Ist Da!!!

Freshly cooled from the oven and dusted with powdered sugar. . .  The 2020 stollen is here!

The Grand Duchess Sonja pulled out all the stops last night and baked one of her authentic Dresdner Stollens.  Once cooled and dusted with the powdered vanilla sugar, we joined each other by the fireside about 10:30pm with some coffee and heated gluehwein to enjoy a couple of small pieces.  Date-filled, buttery, crusty, and it just melts in your mouth.  The Young Master will enjoy some with his breakfast when I wake him in a little while.  And then the rest is mine, mine, mine!  All mine! (Diabolical laughter).  

Sorry.  I got a bit carried away there.  I'll be better directly.

Long-time visitors might recall that the name for my fictitious campaign setting came to me in a flash one Saturday afternoon way back in early December 2005, possibly on or around Leuthen Day on the 5th, as the Grand Duchess baked a stollen for her German students.  Classes had ended for the semester, Finals Week was upon us, and I was across the hall from the kitchen of our old apartment in "The Purple Room," which served as my old office and hobby area.  

Looking around to breathe some new life into my hobby and a way to get back to the roots of wargaming, I had very recently stumbled across the old Yahoo Old School Wargaming Group, Henry Hyde's original Battlegames website, Greg Horne's Duchy of Alzheim blog, and Phil Olley's original Phil's War Cabinet website.  All at the time were firmly rooted in the mid-18th century, classic Spencer Smith, Holger Eriksson, Tradition, Willie, and RSM95 figures, the Featherstone approach, imaginary combatants, and the like.  

"This is it!" thought I and began casting about for suitable names for my own similar project.  It all fit so wonderfully with my own ideas based on an ongoing fascination with Young and Lawford's Charge!  Or How to Play War Games, which I first had purchased and read in 1994.  

Anyway, as the wonderfully eggy and yeasty aroma of the baking stollen filled our apartment that afternoon, it hit me like a bolt of lightening from the pre-Christmas sky.  And The Grand Duchy of Stollen was born.  The project has ebbed and flowed during the years since as life has thrown milestones and millstones my way, but we're still here and making slow progress with new units painted, mostly scratch-built scenery, reading about 18th century warfare, rules-writing, and even the occasional tabletop battles fought.  

I've not looked back too wistfully at my previous (and unfinished) 15mm Waterloo corps-level project.  My own personal boulevard of broken dreams as I prefer to think of it.  The Grand Duchy of Stollen project, on the contrary, is home.  It has held my interest for many years now and continues to do so without a waver.  Extremely "comfortable" as the late Stuart Asquith might have written.

On Saturday the 19th, the Virtual Wargaming Club met via Zoom for its Christmas get together and final meeting this year (we'll resume in January).  Host Phil Olley began the session by noting the date and relating that he returned to Britain aboard ship on December 19th, 1985 after a six month stint in The Falkland Islands (truly the ends of the earth from what I have read).  Ever since, as Phil explained it, the Christmas season really starts for him on December 19th.  

For yours truly, by comparison, Christmas well and truly begins when The Grand Duchess bakes one of her stollens.  Some years it is sooner in December, some years later.  But once that aroma fills the house, Christmas has come as far as I am concerned.

The festive season is, in my adult life, tied inexorably to life with The Grand Duchess.  Indeed, it was 20 years ago now that I first realized how much I cared for this crazy Ph. D. student with bright blue eyes and freckles, who sat two desks away in our shared office at The University of Minnesota.  She had just successfully defended her dissertation on East German science fiction of all things.  Just a couple of days before all of us dispersed for the Christmas and New Year's period to our respective families.  

And during the next three weeks, while I enjoyed Christmas at home with my parents, I nevertheless had the nagging feeling that I should do something crazy like make the journey to where Sonja was with family outside of Philadelphia to spend the holidays with her.  It was all very Sleepless in Seattle.  I didn't do so of course.  A saner head prevailed.  But boy was I glad to see Sonja back in Minnesota once the new semester began in mid-January.  

An all day cross-country skiing jaunt with her a month later in mid-February 2001 followed.  We tacked on to that a lengthy late afternoon conversation over hot tea back at my place, dinner at a nearby Ukrainian delicatessen (Kramarczuk's) in Minneapolis, plus a 30-strong accordion band playing as we enjoyed our meal.  All of that sealed the deal as far as I was concerned.  The 12 hours or so we spent together that Saturday were magical, and I fell like the proverbial ton of bricks.

Two decades later, here we are.  At the risk of sounding like Wodehouse's moon-eyed Madeline Bassett, isn't it funny the way life sometimes works out?

-- Stokes