The little swimming houses were really gorgeous, and everything was full of hordes of kids and their parents and grandparents and (for some reason) dogs, and lots of baby carriages parked along the path by the pond.

Celebrations around St. Lucy's Day are actually mostly a) Scandinavian and b) pagan in origin. You get these twelve days before and after Yule when there are dangerous creatures about -- still very extant in Iceland, with Jólasveinar trolls (which I learned about because my sister is a big Iceland fan and wrote a privately published Icelandic cookbook as a birthday present for her husband, centered around those midwinter trolls because they are known for eating the good food served around Christmas), and the festival around the Queen of Lights in Sweden and other Scandinavian countries (at least as far from the original St. Lucy of Syracuse as Santa Claus is from St. Nicolas of Myra) is really an attempt at Christianising those old heathen customs.

I guess the footsore leftovers of the migration age that later gelled into the Bavarians had similar customs; they were some sort of Germanic tribes, after all, mixed in with the original Celtic inhabitants and the Roman settlers that didn't want to leave when the empire officially did.