We watched "The Sound of Music" over the weekend and I can't get the song "Edelweiss" out of my head!!!
The first time I paid any attention to this lovely European mountain flower was when we stayed at the Edelweiss Lodge and Resort in Garmisch, Germany. On the wall of the entrance was a huge mural portraying a young German fellow climbing a dangerous precipice to obtain an edelweiss flower for the love of his life, who watched him in great anxiety from their picnic spot below. Pictures of the edelweiss (pronounced aid-el-vise) flower were everywhere. I brought home as a souvenir pressed and framed edelweiss flowers, which look lovely on my living room wall.
Edelweiss comes from the German word "edel" (meaning noble) and "weiß" (meaning white.) The leaves and flower are woolly and soft, covered with white hairs. It usually grows in inaccessible places in the mountains of Europe and Asia. On the Austrian euro coins, a picture of Edelweiss is used on the two euro cent coins. The flower has even been used by the German mountain troops of WWII, who pinned it to their uniforms as a symbol of being a "true soldier," since the flower only grows in rugged terrain above the tree line.
Maybe now that I've written about it and listened to the song again on YouTube, I can finally put it to rest in my head.....
2 comments:
Our family took the Sound of Music tour in Salzburg last summer and we (especially me) sang the songs for weeks. I drove the kids crazy!!
at least you had a BEAUTIFUL song stuck in your head. i don't like it when i have a dumb jingle for example stuck in my head. when i was a kid, i paid my brother and sister $0.25 everytime i accidentally started singing/humming this lame jingle. it didn't help me stop. i still kept singing it, but only now i owed people money on top of it.
enjoy :) kathleen
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