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Christmas 2020: With mouth and nose protection in front of the Christmas tree
Photo: Sebastian Gollnow / dpa
At Christmas, a maximum of ten people from an unlimited number of households are allowed to come together in "closest family or friends", children up to 14 years of age are excluded.
The federal and state governments agreed on this this week.
What does this ten-person limit mean in concrete terms for the Germans' Christmas plans?
A survey by the opinion research institute Civey for SPIEGEL shows that the limit does not play a role for the majority.
More than 70 percent said they didn't have to spend their Christmas any differently than planned.
Only around 23 percent said they had to reschedule because of the upper limit on the holidays.
Almost two thirds of those surveyed with children in their own household stated that they did not have to reschedule Christmas.
In the case of respondents from childless households, it was even three quarters of those questioned.
There is agreement across almost all political camps.
The greatest deviations were only found among AfD supporters: a third of those surveyed said that they would have to reschedule their Christmas due to the new federal-state rules, and a quarter of the left-wing supporters surveyed said yes.
Voters from the Greens expressed the fewest problems with the ten-person rule: Only 18 percent said they would have to reorganize the Christmas days.
Many Germans also plan to voluntarily limit their contacts over the holidays.
When asked whether they plan to have less direct contact with other people this Christmas than last year, 60 percent answered yes.
30 percent want to celebrate as always, a good tenth were still undecided.
The picture only changes with a look at party preference.
According to this, more than two thirds of the supporters of the CDU / CSU, SPD and Greens said they wanted to forego contacts this year, and more than half of the left supporters also said yes.
Only with the FDP and AfD does the picture change: Here, significantly more than half of the supporters surveyed want to celebrate with as many people this year as in the previous year.
In the state of Berlin, due to the persistently high number of infections, the five-person contact restriction is to remain in place over the festive period, only the restriction to two households is being relaxed, according to Berlin's Governing Mayor Michael Müller (SPD).
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