I feel terrible … I’ve left the children at home and Seiffen, nicknamed Spielzeugdorf (The Toy Village), is literally a Christmas wonderland. Every street is alive with sparkling fairy lights and soft candlelight. There are thousands of tiny wooden figurines, train sets and toy animals displayed in shop windows, wooden pyramids taller than doorframes and colourful nutcracker characters. Forget elves in the north pole, this is the real Santa’s workshop. For hundreds of years, here in the village of Seiffen, wood turners and carvers have created classic wooden Christmas toys and sold them around the world.
Near the border of the Czech Republic, Seiffen may be well known in the German-speaking world as the “home of Christmas”, but so far it has been largely missed by English-speaking seasonal tourists. Tucked away in the Ore Mountains, about an hour and a half south of Dresden, it is not the easiest place to get to by public transport – the nearest train station is in Olbernhau, nearly 7 miles (11km) away. Buses are available, but we opt for a hire car and make our way into the hills, arriving the day after the first snowfall of the year. The roads are cleared quickly, but snow clings to the branches of the spruce trees. We half expect to see the Gruffalo’s child, but only spot a rust-coloured fox making its way through a fresh field of snow.
The surrounding forests we drive through are key to Seiffen’s survival. (The only reason we are here is a tipoff from a friendly German forester who said it was a must-see.) The Ore Mountains – Erzgebirge in German – were classified as a Unesco world heritage site in 2019 due to their rich history of mining. For 800 years, the area was shaped by intensive silver and tin mining (and later uranium).
Seiffen was built in the 1300s just below the mountain ridge and is surrounded by forests of spruce, pine and beech. Mining and forestry go hand in hand. Timber was essential for making pit props to hold up the roofs of mines, and for tool-making. So when the supply of tin dried up and the miners were forced to find an alternative way to make a living, they sourced the timber on their doorstep, modified their machinery and first made wooden bowls and spoons, before turning to what would make them famous – toys. One craftsman took his toys to a nearby Christmas market and came back with pockets full of coins, and the rest, as they say, is history. Families in every corner of the village began making small animals and figurines in their homes, with everyone pitching in to help carve and paint them.
It is difficult to know where to start in a town full of twinkly lights and warm, inviting shops, but a trip to the toy museum (Erzgebirgisches Spielzeugmuseum, €9) makes sense. Open since 1936, it tells the story of Seiffen’s toy-making traditions. The short video is recommended as it is the only information supplied in English. Despite the language barrier, the 5,000 exhibits – ranging from nutcrackers to train sets, Noah’s arks to minuscule matchbook carvings (including the “smallest kitchen in the world”) – will, if you are into that kind of thing, keep you amazed for hours. There are even traditional wooden toys that little (or big) kids can play with. To this day, Seiffen continues its toy-making tradition and even played host to the European Toy Maker festival earlier this year.
To experience the toy-making in action, we head to the Seiffener Volkskunst workshop for the toy-decorating session we have booked. We walk through the shop, the tiny figurines and moving candle wheels stealing our attention, then past the viewing gallery of wood-turners and toy-painters. The way they turn the wood here is something special. In the 1800s, craftsmen created a method called hoop-turning, in which a specifically designed lathe turns a piece of wood into a thick ring shape with notches and grooves. When they slice it, the shape of the animal or toy is revealed. This enabled the mass production of figurines, contributing to the economic success of Seiffen throughout the 19th century. Currently, only a few people in the world still use this technique.
For our decorations, I choose a Christmassy-looking toadstool to paint, my partner a characterful duck, plus we take home a forest house to build with the children. Our little decorations are made with wood from local birch, beech, maple and linden trees. We sit alongside the professional toy painters, who are painting nutcrackers and snowmen, a slow mindful feeling settling over us.
One decoration I am particularly drawn to is the candle arch, or schwibbogen. These beautifully crafted objects depict the history of the village, sometimes with the local church above and mining figures at work below. Heritage is important in Seiffen, and when the advent season starts each year, there is a miners’ parade, with costumes that would have been worn 400 years ago.
after newsletter promotion
Next, our decorations safely packaged away, we walk the streets of the village and come to understand that each shop has its own style and personality. Some toymakers focus on nutcrackers, some on angels, some on Räuchermänner, incense-burning figures. The more modern artisans’ shops, such as Wendt & Kühn, are fascinating to look around, with smartly decorated interiors, although the toys’ price tags reflect this. In fact, you could spend hundreds of euros in even the most down-to-earth places, with some pyramids costing more than €2,000.
After a lunch of delicious leek soup called Heidi (€7.80) at Hotel Seiffener Hof, we walk to the church, an unusual octagonal shape, which is depicted in so many of the archways and decorations they sell here, and listen a while as the organ is played.
As the Christmas season sets in the sun drops early, so we try a shot of heisse holunderbeere, hot elderberry served with vodka and a dollop of whipped cream on top, to warm us up. Then we take two cups of red glühwein on a walk up the hill and on to the historic miners’ trail. The snow is untrodden up here and it crunches underfoot as we make our way to the Binge, once the opencast mine used to extract tin, now an amphitheatre for the community. The wooden benches arranged in a semi-circle are white, and the only sound we hear today is the dripping of the melting snow.
We climb further up the steps on to the hill made of the waste material left over from the mining years. Now there are birch trees thriving, and we look down over the valley as the lights of the houses click on.
Before the temperature drops further, we enjoy rostbratwurst (grilled sausage) from a street seller and another mulled wine outside the central Hotel Erbgericht Buntes Haus. It is properly cold now. The shops are shutting and the paths are freezing, so we begin to walk back up the hill to our hotel, stopping every few minutes to look at the lights below. We are welcomed into the Panorama Berghotel Wettiner Höhe (rooms from €79), where we settle in for the night, well and truly ready for the Christmas season ahead.
