Germany puts on somewhere between two and three thousand Christmas markets a year. That number does two things at once: it tells you the country takes this seriously, and it warns you that a lot of them are interchangeable. Thirty huts, the same Bratwurst grill, a plastic reindeer. The difference between a market worth crossing the country for and one you could skip is bigger than the brochures suggest.
Here is how to tell them apart, and what to do once you are standing there with cold feet.
The Mug Is the Part Nobody Explains
You order a Glühwein, hot spiced red wine, and the price you pay includes a deposit on the mug. Hand the empty back at any stand on that market and you get the deposit returned. Or you keep the mug, walk away, and nobody minds in the slightest, because that is the other half of the system.
Most markets have their own design, usually with the town and the year on it, and people collect them. Kitchen cupboards all over Germany hold a stack of these, one per trip, going back decades. It is the cheapest and by far the best souvenir a Christmas market sells, and the shops on the same square are full of worse ones at ten times the price.
If you want the version with more theater, look for Feuerzangenbowle: a sugarloaf soaked in rum, set on fire above a bowl of hot wine, dripping caramel as it burns. There is a Kinderpunsch for children and for anybody skipping the alcohol, and it is not a consolation prize.
Eat before you drink. Bratwurst in a roll that is deliberately too small for it, roasted chestnuts, sugared almonds, and in the Rhineland Reibekuchen, fried potato pancakes served with applesauce, which sounds wrong and is not.
The Big Names, and What Each One Actually Has
Nuremberg is the one the world knows. It opens on the Friday before the first Advent Sunday, when a young woman in a gold crown and gold-white robes recites the prologue from the gallery of the Frauenkirche as the Christkind. What to buy there: Zwetschgenmännle, little figures made from dried prunes, and the flat gold-foil Rauschgoldengel angels. Both have been market trademarks for close to two centuries.
Dresden runs the Striezelmarkt on a charter from 1434, which is the whole argument about which market is oldest, and I go into that on my page about German Christmas. What matters on the ground is that roughly four out of five traders come from Saxony, so the wares are actually regional: Herrnhut stars, Pulsnitz gingerbread, Ore Mountains woodwork. The market mascot is the Pflaumentoffel, a chimney sweep made of prunes, modeled on the boys who once sold soot-black and had nothing else to sell.
Munich traces its market back to a Nikolaimarkt recorded in 1310, renamed the Christmarkt in 1806, on the Marienplatz since 1972. Two things there are worth your time. The Kripperlmarkt by the Alter Peter is the largest nativity market in the country, running as its own thing since the eighteenth century, where you can buy a stable lantern or a single missing sheep. And the tree on the square is donated every year by a different town in Austria or Italy. In return, that town gets to run a Glühwein stand in the town hall courtyard, which is apparently such a good deal that there is a waiting list. ;-)
Augsburg does the single most striking thing of any German Christmas market, and almost nobody outside Bavaria has heard of it. The Renaissance town hall happens to have twenty-four windows in a grid. On Advent weekends, young women in costume appear in them as angels, playing and singing, and the whole facade becomes a living Advent calendar.
It looks medieval and it is not. A tourism director came up with it in 1977 after studying a Holbein painting, and the angels are roped into safety harnesses out of sight. Knowing that does not spoil it.
Cologne stages several markets at once, and the one at the foot of the cathedral is worth it for the setting alone. Berlin works differently again: there is no single Berlin market but dozens spread across the city, from the polished one on the Gendarmenmarkt to scruffy neighborhood affairs, and picking the right one matters more there than anywhere else.
Smaller, and Often Better
Rothenburg ob der Tauber has held a market since the fifteenth century and calls it the Reiterlesmarkt, after a figure who rides in to open it. Look up what the Reiterle originally was, though: a rider from the other world who passed through the winter sky with the souls of the dead. People used to be frightened of him. Now children wave.
The Ore Mountains do Christmas harder than anywhere else in Germany, because the region built its whole craft economy on it after the silver ran out. The markets there open with Bergparaden, miners’ parades, hundreds of men marching in the dress uniforms of an industry that has mostly stopped existing, brass bands in front. It is a strange and moving thing to watch, and it is the reason the wooden figures you see everywhere else in December come from here.
Then there are the markets that exist for one reason: a castle courtyard, a monastery cloister, a gorge under a railway viaduct. Several of those open only on weekends, which is worth checking before you drive two hours to one.
Getting the Timing Right
Go on a weekday. Saturday afternoon on the Nuremberg Hauptmarkt is not a Christmas market experience, it is a crowd management exercise, and you will spend it looking at the back of somebody’s coat.
Late afternoon into early evening is the sweet spot—lights on, the after-work crowd not yet arrived. Mornings are for buying, because you can talk to the person who carved the thing you are holding, and at nine in the evening they have no time for you. Bring cash. Card readers have spread, but a small hut with hand-carved stock is not the place to rely on your phone.
Dress for standing still. This is the mistake visitors make most often: you are not walking briskly around a city, you are standing in one place in the cold for four hours holding something warm. Boots and a real coat, not a fashionable one.
You will also notice concrete barriers and bag checks at the entrances of the larger markets. They have been standard for years now. Nobody here makes a thing of it, and neither should you.
Most markets shut down on the 22nd or the 23rd of December, which catches out more visitors than any other single fact about a German Christmas. The customs that fill the days after that are on my page about German Christmas traditions.
And take the mug. Every year you go, take the mug. :-)