The Month When Two Christmases Meet: A letter from a distributed family

Every December our Discord goes quiet in the most beautiful way.

In Germany the Christmas markets open, the air smells of cinnamon and pine, and people start counting the days until they can legally disappear into the woods with their families.  

In Douala the harmattan dust turns the sky orange, churches rehearse choirs that will sing all night on the 24th, and every auntie is already planning how many kilos of food she’ll need for the 25th.

We are one company, but we live inside two different Decembers.

In Germany we are proud of doing things “richtig”;  the tree must be real, the cookies must be homemade, the Stollen must come from a bakery that’s been around since 1872. Sustainability used to mean buying the organic, fair-trade version of everything.

Then I tasted Christmas through Cameroonian eyes and realised that reusing isn’t a trend; it’s how you feed thirty people when the money is tight and the love is wide.

The Christmas meal that teaches patience

In many Cameroonian homes, the big meal on the 25th is built around whatever the family managed to save or share during the year. Ndolé is cooked with bitter leaves someone dried months ago, poulet DG is made with chicken raised in the backyard, and the plantains come from the tree behind the house. Nothing is wasted: even the peanut skins get turned into sauce.

In Germany we plan weeks ahead, buy exact quantities, and still somehow end up with three extra Lebkuchen tins nobody wants in February.

So now we borrow from both worlds. Every year our team does a voluntary “Christmas recipe swap” in December. Someone in  Schwarzwald learns to make achu with yellow soup from a teammate’s grandmother’s voice-note instructions. Someone in Douala receives a 100-year-old family recipe for Vanillekipferl, measured in “grandma handfuls” instead of grams.

Last year one of our devs in Yaoundé made German Springerle for the first time using anise he found at the marché Mozambique. His kids declared them “too beautiful to eat” and kept them as decorations until March. We decided that counts as sustainability.

The wreath that comes back to the earth

In Germany we pay good money for noble-fir wreaths that smell amazing for two weeks and then go brown.  

In Cameroon people weave crowns from palm fronds, raffia, or dried mango leaves. When the season ends, you leave them in the yard and they simply become soil again.

Every year we post photos of our wreaths in the team channel; plastic, evergreen, woven, or just a circle of candles on the table. No judgment, just stories. It has become one of the gentlest ways we remind each other that beauty doesn’t have to be permanent to be real.

What we’re actually trying to protect

None of this is about being perfect. Some of us still over-buy. Some of us still check Slack on the 26th because muscle memory is strong.

But every year we get a little better at remembering what both cultures keep teaching us in different languages:

The season isn’t about how much we manage to consume.  

It’s about how much flavour, how much laughter, how much togetherness we manage to stretch out of whatever we already have.

Wherever you are this December; whether the sky is dusty orange or white with snow; may your table be full, your leftovers inventive, and your people close (even if only on a video call).

And may the people you started the year with still be there when the new one begins.

From our two sunrises to yours,  

Frohe Weihnachten • Joyeux Noël • Merry Christmas