Dimon Kendrick-Holmes: Where every day is Oktoberfest

My family is observing Oktoberfest today, the very last day of the month. I wouldn't call it procrastination -- more like saving the best for last.

Oktoberfest is a big tradition in our house. When our son Joe was 3, his Sunday School teacher asked each child to name a favorite food, and Joe's pick was "beer bratwurst."

Up to that point, we'd never actually called it beer bratwurst, but Joe, who wants to be a chef, has always watched us carefully in the kitchen, discerned the subtlety of flavors and given dishes his own names.

Hence beer bratwurst. Of course, we got a phone call about it. Bess explained that the sausage in this particular dish is braised in perhaps a bit of beer along with onions and peppers, but that the alcohol evaporates in the cooking process.

The name stuck. All my children have since had a knack for using the term "beer brats" whenever addressing grandparents, clergy or child care providers.

It's also a fixture on our Oktoberfest menu, along with schnitzel, spaetzle, saerkraut and strudel.

We'll also try new things. Last year I made rolladen, slices of rolled-up flank steak stuffed with onions, bacon and pickles, pan-fried and slow-cooked in gravy. It was good but not great, or at least not great enough to make the permanent rotation.

Orange Fanta is always on the menu, but it has to be the German kind made with pure cane sugar instead of corn syrup. (Fanta from Mexico is a more than capable substitute.)

But we aren't just celebrating German food. We're also celebrating an important chapter in our family's history.

For Bess and me, our Oktoberfest actually began in May of 1991 when we married and flew nearly 5,000 miles to live in Germany. It was a true example of "leave and cleave." We left behind our families, friends and everybody we knew.

Quickly, we learned to get along, which anybody who's been married knows is not always easy. When I wasn't in the field with my unit, Bess and I would travel somewhere, anywhere.

One day we were riding bikes through farmland near our house and passed a church. Bess stopped pedaling. She'd just earned a degree in European history and fine arts. "Hey," she said, "I studied that building in college." So we went inside.

This was nothing unusual. Another time, we biked up to the top of a mountain and discovered a medieval castle serving weizenbier brewed by monks.

Bess gravitated to cathedrals, while I was drawn to castles.

But it didn't really matter. At Neuschwanstein castle, we watched backpack-toting children walk sleepily to school while this vision of a madman loomed overhead.

In Cologne Cathedral, we noticed how important your footsteps sound when you're strolling through a soaring stone structure wearing hard-soled shoes.

It was there in Germany, during this endless Oktoberfest, that we learned to stop and watch and listen, and to wonder about our place in the world and what we might do in it together.

That experience set the tone for our family, and we celebrate it today.

Contact Dimon Kendrick-Holmes, executive editor, at dkholmes@ledger-enquirer.com

This story was originally published October 30, 2015 at 10:27 PM with the headline "Dimon Kendrick-Holmes: Where every day is Oktoberfest ."