Der Stollen 2024 Ist Da!!!

A placeholder photograph borrowed from Wikipedia until I can get my own photo up here in its place.

Guess what? Yes, I am enjoying the first two slices of this year's stollen with hot coffee right now, and it is delicious! As soon as the Grand Duchess sends me the photographs I took with her iPhone a few moments ago, I'll share a picture here. Of course, I misplaced my own phone after photographing the candles late yesterday evening. Argh!!!

Longtime visitors to the Grand Duchy might recall that the territory and its immediate neighbors were first conceived way back in early December 2005 once Saturday afternoon as the Grand Duchess baked a small stollen to share with her German students at the time during their final exams. My home office at the time was across the hallway in our old apartment, the much missed Purple Room, where I sat enjoying the aroma of baking as I tried to come up with a catchy name for a new semi-fictitious mid-18th century campaign.

And, as I have written here before, the Grand Duchy of Stollen hit me like a bolt from the blue! Like that, the Grand Duchy of Stollen was born! Somewhere east of the sun and west of the moon in the general vicinity of that nebulous region batted back and forth between Prussia, Austria, Poland-Lituania, the Grand Duchy of Courland, and Russia, Stollen finally disappeared from maps with the third partition of Poland in 1795 and has been largely forgotten given is relative insignificance.

But fear not! The Grand Duchy and its terminally befuddled ruler, Grand Duke Irwin-Amadeus II, a kind of Bertie Wooster in a powdered wig, live on here courtesy of the Grand Duchy of Stollen Blog,which will turn 19 years old in late August or September 2025.

-- Stokes

Comments

The 18th century? What's the Fascination?

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The Grand Duchy of Stollen

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