Every year on the last day before Christmas Eve the stadium of the East Berlin club 1. FC Union Berlin is transformed into a very special and magical place.
Where otherwise on the many weekends of a football season crowds of passionate fans get to see exciting and thrilling second league football, this Sunday evening there is a very different show to enjoy.
For the 16th time the best fans of the world meet today for their traditional Christmas singing, to celebrate the start of the holidays together with the Union family and to toast to the so far so successful season with a warming Glühwein and to show that football fans with rough throats can not only sing fan songs, but also hit the fine notes.
This ritual clearly shows how close the bond between club and fans has grown and is a very special expression of what it means to belong to the Union family.
The 28,500 available tickets were sold out in advance within only 8 hours.
A clear sign of the great popularity of this event organised by fans for fans.
Everything starts small
It all started little when in 2013 a small group of Union fans secretly sneaked into the stadium to meet again at the halfway line to wish each other a Merry Christmas. Union had once again lost a home game and were at the bottom of the table stuck deep in the relegation battle. They wanted to motivate each other once more and make sure that they shared the same unshaken spirit.
Already in the next year the got club involved, who gave its blessing to the annual Christmas singing in its stadium from now on and helped with the organization.
From year to year more fans came together on this day and the Christmas singing has since then a fixed place in the calendar of the FC Union Berlin and of many of its members.
We could see how close the solidarity between the fans and the stadium "Alte Försterei" is during the big reconstruction works of the years 2008 to 2013, when thousands of Union fans voluntarily and unpaid built their second living room. An already legendary story that has made it into the annals of Union Berlin forever.
Some place for everybody
The audience at the Christmas singing is colorfully mixed and when seeing some of the participants at first glance, you wouldn't necessarily think that their throats would also be able to give way to some merry tones. But of course when it starts everybody sings the club anthem, since first of all they are in a football stadium, where normally the best fans of the world present their hymns and chants.
Tonight the stadium will be transformed into a sea of lights made up of thousands of candles and a very thoughtful but also uplifting atmosphere will give long-lasting goose bumps to everyone, even to the toughest visitors, who might have already experienced one or the other severe tide sweeping through this stadium in the many years Union has been playing here.
This Sunday afternoon, a few hours car drive, Union will be playing its last game of the year, at Erzgebirge Aue. For the fans who have gone on this last away trip, I really hope they will return to Berlin safely and as fast as possible, without any traffic jams and further problems. Let them arrive just in time at 7 p.m. in the "Alte Försterei", in order to be able to strike up their club's anthem with thousands of like-minded people and then to sing themselves into the Christmas holidays, living the stadium in a very reflective mood.
And well before this very special event and also a long time afterwards until late into the night, at various corners and in many streets in East Berlin we will be able to hear a well-known battle cry, which will not lose any of its popularity in the next years to come.
~ EISERN UNION !
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