How I used to turn my nose up at cuckoo clocks as tourist kitsch, which they are, to be honest.

I sucked it up and bought one, a "real" one in the Black Forest style, for my wife on her birthday as she used to rabbit on about that sort of thing that hung on her grandfather's wall; he was a professional soldier who did a couple tours in postwar Germany.

A second one, more of an Alpine style, was given her by her brother when they moved house. This one was non-running but a classic (almost cynically) tourist-aimed version that has a Swiss-made music-box mechanism in it as well as all sorts of automaton things like eating goats, a woodchopper, and a chimney-sweep. Even the tunes it plays are well-known to American tourists as "German Folksong" when they aren't. One is "Edelweiss", a Rogers and Hammerstein showtune from Sound of Music and the other is "The Happy Wanderer", which was a postwar song written for some childrens choir that went big on the commercial charts in the 1950s. Hilarious to me, the two tunes that Americans most identify with Germany. GRIN!

I used to despise them as kitsch, and now that I've had the second one rebuilt there are two of them in the house cheerfully chirping and clattering on every 30 minutes and they just make me smile.