Land in Germany on December 24 and you have missed most of it. Christmas here is not a day, it is four weeks with a fixed shape, and nearly everything worth traveling for happens before the holiday itself begins. By the 25th the market stalls are being taken apart, the shops are locked, and we Germans are settling into two days of doing very little.
That gap between what visitors expect and what actually happens catches people out every year.
Advent Is the Real Season
Everything starts on the fourth Sunday before Christmas, which lands somewhere between the last days of November and the third of December. That evening the first candle on the Adventskranz (Advent wreath) gets lit, and from there the whole month runs on a countdown. Four Sundays, four candles, and a general agreement that the pace drops.
The wreath is younger than it looks. A Hamburg theologian named Johann Hinrich Wichern built the first one in 1839 at the Rauhes Haus, a home he ran for children off the street, and it was a cartwheel carrying a candle for every single day of Advent: four large white ones for the Sundays, a small red one for each weekday between. The children lit one more every morning. Fir branches came later, around 1860, and the tidy four-candle version everybody owns today is what happened when a cartwheel had to fit on a table.
The Adventskalender (Advent calendar) came out of Munich a lifetime later, printed by a publisher named Gerhard Lang who was copying a homemade one his mother had sewn for him. He was not the only one with the idea, and his had no doors yet. Those came about two decades on, the chocolate much later still.
What nobody warns you about is the baking. From the first Sunday onward, kitchens fill with Plätzchen, small cookies produced in quantities meant to last the month, and a household that runs out before Christmas Eve has planned badly.
December 6, and Where Your Santa Comes From
On the evening of the fifth, children put a boot outside the door. Overnight it fills with nuts, tangerines, chocolate, and small things. If the year has gone badly there is supposed to be a Rute (a birch switch) instead, although that threat is officially the department of Knecht Ruprecht, the grim figure who travels with Saint Nicholas and exists mainly to make six-year-olds nervous. :-)
December 6 is Nikolaustag, Saint Nicholas Day. It is not Christmas, it is not the day the real presents arrive, and the man in question is not the one you grew up with.
Except that he is, by a long detour. Dutch settlers carried Sinterklaas to New Amsterdam, the name wore down into Santa Claus, and the red-suited version sailed back across the Atlantic generations later as an import. Our Weihnachtsmann is partly our own saint coming home with an American accent.
The Big Night Is the 24th
Presents are opened on the evening of December 24. Not in the morning, not on the 25th. The word for it is Bescherung, and depending on which part of the country you are standing in, the gifts come from either the Christkind or the Weihnachtsmann.
That split has a twist in it that most people here never think about. The Christkind, a child figure with wings and a crown, was Martin Luther’s idea, invented to pull children’s attention away from a Catholic saint. Somewhere in the centuries since, the map flipped: the Christkind now reigns in the Catholic south and west, the Weihnachtsmann in the Protestant north and east. Nobody planned that. It just happened.
Dinner that night is famously plain. The most common Christmas Eve meal in the country is potato salad with sausages, and in the eastern states it is close to universal, which seems like a strange thing to serve on the biggest evening of the year until you know why.
December 24 used to be a fast day, the last one before the feast, so the evening meal stayed deliberately simple and the roast goose waited until the 25th. The rule disappeared and the potato salad stayed, which is roughly how every custom on this page came about. The full run of them sits on my page about German Christmas traditions, from Krippenspiel (the children’s nativity play) to the southern habit of praising a neighbor’s tree and collecting a schnapps for the compliment.
Two Days of Doing Very Little
The 25th and the 26th are both public holidays, nationwide, and the second one trips up almost every visitor. Two full days, back to back, on top of an already quiet 24th. My list of German holidays has the rest of the year.
These are family days, not going-out days. Roast goose or duck comes to the table, people drive to their grandparents, and the country essentially stops. Then follows the stretch we call zwischen den Jahren, between the years, that low-wattage week when nobody is entirely sure what day it is and half the workforce is on leave.
What We Sent Out into the World
The Christmas tree is ours, broadly speaking. It grew out of the Upper Rhine, the Alsace and Baden corner, where guild halls and churches were putting up decorated firs in the sixteenth century. One stood in the Strasbourg cathedral in 1539, and by 1605 somebody in the same city noted that people were setting firs up in their living rooms and hanging them with paper roses, apples, communion wafers, and gold foil. Candles show up at the court in Hanover around 1660.
You will read in a lot of places that the first one stood in Freiburg in 1419. The city archive says that is a mix-up: the 1419 document records the founding of a bakers’ brotherhood, not a decorated tree. The correction has been out there for years and almost nobody has picked it up.
Two more exports, both from the east of the country. In the Ore Mountains, silver miners who had run out of silver turned to carving instead, which is where nutcrackers, candle arches, smoking men, and the turning Christmas pyramids all come from. The arch shape is not decorative, by the way. It is the mine entrance, remembered in wood.
The other comes from Herrnhut in Upper Lusatia, where pupils at a Moravian boarding school folded paper stars in geometry class. A diary entry from the 1820s describes one with 110 points, lit from inside by a lamp. The design was simplified, patented, and carried out along the mission routes of the Moravian Church.
So if you have ever seen a Moravian Star hanging in a church porch in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, or in Winston-Salem, you have seen something that started in a Saxon village of a few thousand people.
And then there is the Christmas pickle, which we did not send anywhere, because it was never ours. Ask two thousand Germans and nine out of ten have never heard of it. The likeliest story is that American importers, bringing in German glass ornaments by the crate from 1890 onward, wrapped a warm legend around a vegetable-shaped bauble and sold it as an ancient custom from the old country. It worked so well that you can now buy one here, marketed as an American tradition. ;-)
When to Come, and When to Skip It
The markets are what most people fly over for, and they run on a schedule that catches visitors out every single year. Most open around the first Sunday of Advent and close on the 22nd or the 23rd of December. Not on Christmas. Before it.
A few big-city markets do keep going through the holidays and into January, Berlin and Cologne among them, but building a Christmas-week trip around that exception is a bad bet. Come between the first Advent weekend and the 22nd and everything is open. Which market to pick is a question of its own, and I have a separate page on German Christmas markets for that.
Which one is oldest is a matter of local pride, and the answer has moved. Dresden holds the Striezelmarkt, running on a charter granted in 1434, which makes it the oldest confirmed by an actual deed. Bautzen counters with an earlier mention in a chronicle. And Nuremberg, whose Christkindlesmarkt is the one everybody abroad has heard of, had to call off its own anniversary: researchers re-read the smudged date on the little wooden box that is the market’s oldest proof, worked out that the woman named in the inscription had not been born yet, and moved the founding fifty years forward. Most guidebooks still print the old number.
The 24th is technically a working day, but shops shut around midday and restaurants either close or fill up with tables booked weeks ahead. Weeks, not a couple of days. On the 25th and 26th everything is shut, down to the supermarkets, and only the pharmacies on emergency rotation stay open. Trains run to a holiday timetable. If your hotel does not serve dinner, solve that before you land.
One last thing, and it says more about the season here than any market photo does. A handful of small towns run their own Christmas post offices every December, staffed by people whose job for a few weeks is answering children’s letters. Engelskirchen takes the mail addressed to the Christkind. Himmelpforten handles the letters for the Weihnachtsmann.
Every single letter gets a written reply.