Decorating for the Holidays

We were asked after a recent post what exactly a "rauchen man" looks like (especially, are they like nutcrackers). While their features may resemble nutcrackers in some ways, the "purpose" of the rauchen man is to "smoke" rather than to crack nuts. You light a small incense cone and insert it in the RM, and the smoldering incense causes it to look like the man is smoking. Also, he doesn't have a handle on his back which causes his mouth to open and close. We did see some nutcrackers, but Steve really had his heart set on one of these guys instead.

In recent years, Podgorica has started to decorate for the holidays. Delta city is covered in strings of white lights, and has both a giant decorated Christmas tree in the hall, and medicine ball sized ornaments hanging from the ceiling. They have even begun to attach decorative lights to the street lights. We had no trouble understanding the snowflakes. Even though it rarely snows in Podgorica, snow is intrinsically linked with Christmas and New Years in the Western hemisphere.

But what, may one ask, were these cone shaped red things? We had a lot of fun speculating. Steve whimsically guessed that perhaps they were angels without wings (or heads, for that matter). Laura's thought was that maybe it was Saint Nicholas from the back, wearing a hooded coat. One of our friends here implied that it was a Christmas tree, just red. If that is the truth, I think our ideas were better :)