Ore Mountains

Instead, she described a place I’d never heard of: the “Christmas ornament town” of Seiffen in the Erzgebirge, or Ore Mountains, a rural part of Saxony so devoted to holiday décor that Germans call it the “home of Christmas.”

The town, surrounded by the Ore Mountains, appears suddenly, its train platform hugged by buildings of cement, steel, and glass.

Never before has it taken a boy from the endless summer of Honolulu to the dark days of die Erzgebirge, the Ore Mountains that separate the Germans from the Czechs.

Hobby treasure hunters have launched expensive searches for it across Germany, from lake bottoms to mines in the eastern Ore Mountains.

That tin is hugely, vastly, easier to extract than the historically important tin mining areas in Europe, the Ore Mountains and Cornwall.