E-Day is barely six months away and Andrea Kiesby feels good about the euro.
Her bakery sells a local gingerbread delicacy called Aachen Printen, which is popular with visitors to this pretty Eifel hamlet near the Belgian and Dutch borders, and often accepts payment in other currencies to encourage her foreign customers.
Juggling with the various notes and coins can be a nuisance because the shop has to run two separate tills. So the arrival of euro cash will be a clear boon for business.
"Our sales staff are used to handling guilders and Belgian francs but they don't always have the right change and the euro will make this much easier," she said.
Shopkeepers understandably dwell on how the launch of euro notes and coins will affect their lives and whether it will run smoothly when in starts to replace the 12 national currencies of the bloc from Jan. 1, 2002.
But those with longer memories will recall a morning 52 years before, when the panzers of Adolf Hitler swept through the Eifel and into the Battle of the Bulge as the Third Reich launched its last big assault against the advancing Allies.
For them, E-day marks the latest step in a grand project begun in the aftermath of World War Two to bind the countries of Europe to peace.
"The European integration process ... was primarily motivated by the wish to eliminate the risk that wars and crises would once more plague the continent," European Central Bank executive board member Sirkka Hamalainen said recently.
Three hundred million members of the common currency bloc will start spending euros from the start of next year in an event that will physically unite the region in a fashion not seen since the times of the Roman emperor Diocletian.
European leaders have sunk considerable political capital into the project and hope that the arrival of physical notes and coins will dispel the scepticism that has dogged the euro since its creation in January 1999.
This was the third stage of European Monetary Union, when the exchange rates of the bloc's 12 currencies were irrevocably fixed at that moment.
But the old notes are still in use and although citizens will get coins in advance, they will not physically set eyes on euro notes until Jan. 1.
When these hit the streets, it completes a process that was formally launched with the Treaty of Rome in 1958, whose signatories declared their support for a common European market.
Barely 10 years later the Werner plan, named after the former Luxembourg prime minister who chaired the group, proposed that the six founding members of the European Economic Community forge a monetary union.
Through the short-lived "snake" pegging their currencies within a 2.25 percent fluctuation band and the formation of the European Monetary System, the goal of a single currency was tabled in a 1988 report under then EC President Jacques Delors.
In 1993 the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty, named after the southern Dutch town where it was signed, created the legal framework for European Monetary Union.
One year on the European Monetary Institute was created as an embryonic European Central Bank.
And on January 1, 1999 the eleven members of EMU -- Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Portugal, Finland, Ireland and Luxembourg -- surrendered their monetary sovereignty to the ECB. Greece joined in January 2001.
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