Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells …..

Jingle Bells …… oh what fun it is to ride on a (one horse) open sleigh! I can’t believe its that time of year again, time to kick off the Christmas sketchbook page! 

This is a ''Prunkschlitten'', an ornamental sleigh used by the aristocracy to promenade around their properties in the winter, I saw it on a visit to the Germanic National Museum in Nuremberg. In the form of a swan, it is actually quite modest in comparison to those used by Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria who loved to go for wild midnight sleigh rides through the Bavarian forests around his famous castle  Neuschwanstein and taaaadaaaa …. here is a peek at the castle in the snow.

Ludwig's eccentric love of entertaining himself with midnight feasts, opera performances, building fantasy castles and sleigh rides, lead to him being declared insane and his eventual demise in a murder/suicide with his doctor in the Starnberger See. Ludwig may have been eccentric but he was also an innovator his luxury sleigh actually had electric lights making it the first ever vehicle with electric lighting. 

Sleighs in a country like Germany with mountains and snow were basically a form of transport but during the Middle Ages the idea of fancy ornamental sledges were trendy among the aristocracy, followed by the upwardly mobile middle class and in the annals of the city of Nuremberg from about 1460 there are reports of wild nightly sleigh parades through the city streets, often becoming boisterous, boozy and resulting in accidents, resulting in bans and curfews. The risk of accidents becoming so great that bells and candles on sleighs in the city were made compulsory….. Boy racers are not a new phenomenon! 

Unfortunately, my lack of talent in drawing horses reared its ugly head again (I wrote about my equine disasters in an earlier post!), I thought that maybe my horsy drawing talents had improved since primary school but alas this was not the case ….. botched a bit of my page and had to cover it up ……. so my sleigh will remain horseless; not a one-horse open sleigh …… just a sleigh! Hey ho! Jingle bells.