#Weihnachtsbäckerei is the Wholesome Christmas TikTok Hashtag You Didn’t Know You Needed
This corner of German baking TikTok is the most Christmassy content online
Merry Christmas one and all! It’s the most wonderful time of the year, and we’d like to make your Christmas a little better.
Social media is well-known for its outlandish food content, and companies like Twisted are, as we’ve discovered, optimizing their content in order to play better on your Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube feeds. (If you haven’t read our story on the deep fried chicken pizzadilla from August, we’d really recommend you do so.)
Generally, “optimizing” means “making it so disgustingly outlandish you wouldn’t know how to eat it” in this case, but thankfully, we’ve found the nicest corner of TikTok where “optimized” food content just means “incredibly sweet”.
Welcome to #Weihnachtsbäckerei, which has been trending on German-language TikTok since December 10th.
The number of views under the hashtag (which translates to “Christmas baking” for those of you who have let your German Duolingo lapse) increased 40% in its first week on the German trending page of TikTok, according to data from TikTok analytics firm Pentos. It’s since gone on to get 10.3 million views in total, and it’s adding between 100,000 and 120,000 views every day in the build-up to Christmas.
Most of the near-1,000 videos using the hashtag are baking videos, though others are from people seemingly looking to capitalize on the popularity of German TikTok users scrolling through the hashtag for recipe inspiration come Christmastime.
The videos in this corner of TikTok run the gamut from slow-mo pans across haphazardly-decorated trays of cookies to luscious, full-color wonders of Nutella-stuffed Christmas trees.
“Baking culture is generally big in Germany and it’s a quite popular activity for friends and families to sit together once a year as it is fun and super simple to do with everyone in a group, especially when it comes to cookies,” says Ümit Memisoglu, an influencer who contributed his own post to the #Weihnachtsbäckerei hashtag.
“It’s not unusual to see offices, for example, flooded with cookies, because the night before someone got together with people and made a mass amount of cookies to share,” he explains. “You could say that ‘Weihnachtsbäckerei’ is pretty much a good representation of that culture.”
Even more German baking goodies — 2,000 videos in all — can be found by searching for videos using a track called ‘In der Weihnachtsbäckerei’ first recorded in 1987 by musician Rolf Zuckowski, who is now a 72-year-old living out his retirement.
The song is a mainstay of German-language Christmases, with the album it’s from being Germany’s best-selling Christmas record ever. The song is taught in schools, and adult children returning home for the holidays often play it as they prepare baked goods with their families. And it’s enjoying a resurgence thanks to its existence on social media such as TikTok.
“‘In der Weihnachtsbäckerei’ has become part of German pre-Christmas and family culture,” Zuckowski tells FFWD. “For me it is like a gift from heaven.”
Zuckowski first wrote the song in the mid-1980s, and his family started singing it in December 1986. “Now it is present on every level of musical life and entertainment, from children singing everywhere up to Helene Fischer and André Rieu.”
But it’s not just superannuated singers who help keep the song in the public consciousness: Zuckowski may not know what TikTok is, but he knows its power. “Social media now plays an important part in spreading the message to all generations, every year again,” he says.
