Marketing Christmas

Germany takes Christmas seriously; Towns not only have multiple Christmas trees, but also have multiple Christmas markets. We wanted to experience this particular holiday madness, so we headed to Cologne for a long weekend.

As we've noticed in previous visits to Germany, there is a wide mix of new and old due to bombing during World War Two. Most of Cologne is more modern architecture like the museum in the foreground of this shot, with a few older buildings (like the Cathedral) sprinkled in. While we do like the cutesy older parts of town, I also quite like the blending of newer, older, and newer-but-made-to-look-older that we encountered.

We climbed the Cathedral tower (as we do) and had a great view down over the modern city. We also got an areal view of this market, which snuggles up next to the Cathedral and is one of the larger ones in town. From above it appears to have a semblance of order, but when you're in it it's a total maze.

And here is that market at night. The tree is giant and has a wide skirt of lights that is lit at night and covers the center of the market. It's a bit hard to make out the crowd in this picture, but it's jam-packed with people. The sun sets pretty early in the winter so by 5:00 pm it was feeling quite late. That didn't stop huge crowds from showing up for hot spiced wine and fried foods. Other than breakfast, all of our meals came from food stands in the markets, and it was fantastic.

The next major market was in the old town. It stretched along the length of this part of the city and was a block wide and a dozen blocks long. The markets are full of stalls that sell various Christmas and non-Christmas related trinkets. We picked up a bunch of ornaments and small decorations, and had a nice time of it.

Each market also had a nativity scene, which we naturally were comparing and contrasting. The old city market had our favorite: The entire scene carved out of logs and tree trunks.

The old city market also had a gnome theme going. These fellas showed up on signs for booths, signs pointing to areas with specific types of vendors, even signs pointing to the toilets. It turned into a bit of a Where's Waldo thing, trying to spy all the ways the little fellas were used.

The third large market we went to was the angel market. It had a starry night theme, and they strung the trees with star-shaped lanterns. The decorations were pretty cool, and hanging out there in the evening and night was neat. This picture gives a sense of the crowds that we encountered. It was high season for the markets, so things were packed well into the night. Thankfully earlier in the day things were a bit quieter so we were not constantly assaulted.

We didn't just wander the markets on the trip, we also visited a few museums. Mary indulged me and we paid a visit to the modern art museum. They were having a display on pop art, which included these boxes on the wall. Mary and I got into quite the discussion about whether this qualifies as art at all, which to me is a marker of art. Mary remains unconvinced. Regardless of the art-i-ness of the boxes, we both quite enjoyed the museum.

Overall we had a great time in Cologne and enjoyed both the markets and city. We will definitely do another market trip next year around the same time, though we may branch out on the town. We hear Nurnberg is nice...