Wunderbar! Others copy German Christmas Markets, but Munich leaves imitators far behind

German Christmas markets are ubiquitous across England these days. It seems that every town has the same collection of wooden sheds, selling a suspiciously similar range of holiday products, with the same Glühwein stands and giant, wheel-shaped grills cooking bratwurst. Some towns … Birmingham is one excellent example … go the whole hog on their stage sets, with towering Christmas pyramids (Weihnachtspyramide), pop-up buildings shaped like Alpine chalets and market-specific collectors' mugs just like the ones on the continent.

So just how different would Christmas markets in Germany be? The 24th Annual Northwestern Girls’ Trip made it our mission to find out. (And to find the best wine bars in beer-sodden Munich.)

While the English take on the German tradition is authentic in many ways, it misses the local, small, community feel we encountered in Bavaria. While there were shops at every market, our Munich experiences seemed to be less about the shopping and much more about locals meeting up and hanging out over a drink. Music was a much bigger deal than at English offerings, and there was far more diversity across Munich’s different markets than anything I’d seen back home. Most of Munich's markets don't really hit their stride until after dark, and many don't even open until mid-afternoon. 

You’ll find abundant write-ups of Munich’s markets with a web search. Here’s mine to add to the well-deserved attention. If you want to do Christmas markets in Germany, it’s hard to imagine anyplace else with this much variety in a very compact area. We managed to time our visit with a blizzard that dumped 18 inches of snow on the city in less than 48 hours. All public transport other than the U-bahn (underground) shut down and walking quickly became perilous as snow turned to packed ice. We persevered and managed to fit all of this in with precarious slipping and sliding from Line 6 stations. Despite copious Glühwein, nobody fell over ... though there were some frantic near misses.

The Christkindlmarkt in Marienplatz square is the starting point for all tourists and, unsurprisingly, this is where you'll find the greatest array of Christmas ornaments. There's a magnificent range of glimmering blown glass options here, including those smaller gap-fillers it can often be hard to find. I was also delighted to find an enormous stand entirely dedicated to the straw ornaments so beloved of the Danes, but with more ornate designs than any I'd seen in Copenhagen. If you're looking for nativity sets, you'll find those clustered in the street leading off the square, opposite the clock tower. Tourists gather here to listen and watch the glockenspiel play at 11 am and noon; even better is if you get lucky enough to hear a live choir from the balcony of the town hall after dark.

There's plenty of food and drink at all of the markets, of course, but this one benefits from being next to the Ratskeller München, in the basement of the town hall, a wonderland of Bavarian decor and dirndl-wearing waitresses serving up traditional fare. If you need to sit down and get warm, have a meal here. The Hofbrau House, with similar decor but a more boisterous atmosphere and live traditional music, is a few blocks away. Note that in the latter you'll be expected to follow local norm and find a spot at communal tables. The appropriate etiquette is to say hello and goodbye, even if you don't speak or share a language. But you'll probably start chatting over your mugs.

If I were in town with children I'd make a beeline to the Christmas Village in the Kaiserhof of the Residenz (top photo), where the back quarter of this square inside the sprawling palace is dedicated to animated tableaux and photo ops. You haven't truly experienced Christmas until you've witnessed an audio-animatronic moose belting out a jaunty version of O, Tannenbaum to his friend the wild boar. This market also had the most diverse mix of shops, from clothes and artisan work to speciality food items. This is where we found our favourite lebkuchen stand (the ones filled with apricot jam are exquisite) and a wonderful range of kids slippers in Bavarian boiled wool, shaped into animals or jaunty elven looks. They had adult sizes, too, and it's only the fact that I have two perfectly good pairs of slippers at home that kept me from snapping up a fabulous version with long, upcurled toes like a medieval jester.

Speaking of the Middle Ages, just a few blocks over from the Residenz you'll find the Medieval
Christmas Market in Wittelsbacher Platz. Sadly, we hit this one between meals but I suspect it would have been my pick for best dining opportunities, with a broad range of sweet and savoury treats. The theming is fantastic, with plenty of people in costume and gothic-inspired market stalls that really do make it feel like you've tipped up in a 14th century town square. All of the shopping opportunities here fit into the theme: this is the place for you if you're looking for dragons, crystals, medieval cosplay clothing, repro weapons or anything in the goth world. The Medieval Market also has a more various array of entertainment on its stage, including period dancers and knights in shining armour, who start up earlier than many of the other markets. Another good one for kids.

If you'd rather be a dancing queen, head for the Pink Christmas Market, set up to celebrate Munich's LGBTQ community and now pretty much everyone's top "must visit" pick. This is less a market and more an outdoor disco with a Glühwein stand running down one entire side of the square. The rainbow glass mugs were the ones we chose to keep across all the markets. There are a handful of quirky shops (star sight: a collection of hunky mermen Christmas ornaments) but the focus of attention is the gloriously camp DJ in his central booth spinning a mix of club classics, German techno pop and dance versions of Christmas pop tunes. Serious fun beneath an aurora of pink light. 

And after you dance yourself to exhaustion there you can stumble into one of the numerous modern, ethnic restaurants nearby. We made a fortunate choice with Jack Glockenbach which, contrary to the expectations set by its name, serves up delicate and flavourful Vietnamese. 

If you want to go artsy and find some proper one-of-a-kind gifts, head to the Schwabing Christmas Market just above the Münchener Freiheit u-bahn station. There are jewellery stands galore. Wood turners. Fabric artists. Glass blowers. Painters. Potters. Plus an entertainment space next to an avenue of food and drink. We thought this was our best tasting Glühwein of the weekend, but that might have been because we were there at the height of the blizzard, when we were slowly being both chilled and soaked to the bone as steady, heavy flakes melted on impact. A fantastic blues band was also raising the temperature. Schwabing was probably the furthest away from my vision of a traditional market, yet the one with the crowd that seemed most resolutely local. 

And what about those wine bars? When you don't want your grapes mulled with spices, a local friend with fabulous taste recommended two:

Frank Weinbar is right outside of the Residenz Christmas market, has a deep list of local wines (and international), a cool vibe and a fantastic sense of humour. The wine-related sayings painted on their windows are worth walking by, even if you don't go in. (Hangovers are temporary, drunk stories are forever.) It's in places like this that you can discover that not only are German whites wildly under-rated, but they do some exceptional light reds. Try the Spatburgunder under the tutelage of the staff here. 

Or take advice from the team over at Weinhaus Neuner, over on the other side of the Marienplatz. The quality of the wine and the staff is the same, but the vibe is very different. They say they're the oldest wine bar in Munich and it certainly feels it, with architecture that makes it seem more like you're drinking in the crypt of a medieval church than a modern establishment. They also have a well-known restaurant and, had we been more organised, we would have booked. This is not a place you just pop into for a meal; they were reserved solid for weeks to come. And yet the wine bar was almost empty on a Saturday afternoon, a warm and quiet secret hidden from the crowds slipping across the pavements outside. 

This is just a short list of the markets on offer. I suspect you could spend weeks exploring. But if you're looking for a place that delivers a big holiday punch, with loads of variety, in an easy-to-cover area, Munich is for you.

York rolls out a magical Christmas shopping weekend

Good PR is a powerful thing.

Early last December I caught a TV news report from York, where a spokesman walked around the city and made a pitch that ... having recovered from and expanded since the city's devastating floods of 2015 ... they now hosted the best Christmas market in the country. Those three beautifully filmed minutes worked their way into my brain. I had to check it out.

Were the markets so much better than my local options that they justified the 5+ hours it takes to get there? Probably not. The news report had implied a series of markets stretching throughout the town. The reality is more compact and featured fewer vendors than I expected. York remains, however, one of England's most charming cities. While the markets didn't extend through the whole of the ancient walled centre, the tasteful decorations did. The weekend we visited also featured an ice sculpture trail.

York is a gorgeous town to wander through at any time of year, thanks to its rich history and sparse incursions by modern bad taste. Vast swathes of town look as they would have in the 1760s. Add Handel's Messiah in York Minster, a remarkable Georgian townhouse decked out for the holidays and what may be the best Christmas shop in England, and the combined experience kicked my festive mood into high gear. Here are the highlights.

THE MARKET
The main market runs for about 300 metres on pedestrianised Parliament Street, running from its start at Coppergate to St. Sampson's Square. There were between 60 and 80 traditional, Alpine-style chalets; it felt roughly twice the size of our local market at Winchester. Add a sprinkling of chalets at the centre of the modern Coppergate shopping centre, all the regular booths in the Shambles market and a pop-up marquee filled with arts and crafts vendors beside that, and the shopping possibilities start to get impressive.

With the exception of shoulder-to-shoulder crowds Saturday afternoon, it was a lot less crowded than Winchester. Most of the Parliament street stalls held the same stuff you can find at Christmas markets up and down the country: hand-crafted outerwear; specialty cheeses, small batch gins and fruit liquors; South American and African imports; Christmas potpourri; wooden kitchen items; star-shaped light shades; food stands serving up mulled wine, sausages and doughnuts. ( I sometimes think there's a factory in China churning this stuff out for similar markets around the world.) There was, however, a slightly higher percentage of local vendors than down South. My favourites included one lady who spent all year making decorations with gilt pine cones, ribbons and bows; a guy who created canine Christmas wreaths from dog treats and a small company that makes authentic Viking drinking horns and wrought iron stands at a fraction of the price you pay in museum shops. (York has a rich Viking history, making the last one deeply appropriate.)

Curiously, there were fewer food and drink options than at other markets. The favourite was clearly the Scandinavian-themed pop-up bar and restaurant called "Thor's TeePee", but the queue was so long every time we passed that we never even considered it.

JORVIK VIKING CENTRE
Distinguished in the UK for being the first cultural attraction to install a Disney-style ride, Jorvik is more of an interpretive centre than a museum. Though the entry is within an ugly 1980s-built shopping mall ... one of the few places within York's city walls blighted by modern architecture ... it sits on top of the actual excavation site of the Viking town centre. After buying your tickets you descend to a dimly lit room where a glass floor lets you walk over part of the dig. You can watch films of the excavations, which spread across a much larger area before the shopping centre came in on top of it. You then board the ride, which takes you through a highly-accurate reconstruction of 10th century Jorvik populated with animatronic people, dogs, chickens and pigs all created from specific skeletons that have been reconstructed from relevant finds. It's all very lifelike, complete with smells, sound effects and the characters speaking the wide range of languages that would have been in use then. You exit the ride into a gallery of display cases filled with actual artefacts of the world you've just seen.

I remember being terribly impressed the first time I visited in 1985, just a year after opening. After 32 years of experiencing advancements in museum display technology, and the past eight steeped in the Viking heritage and Danish travel that came with marrying into the Bencards, I'm less impressed. While the ride is still good, the gallery at the end is a disappointment. It's far too cramped for the crowds coming through. Too many display cases in the walls, where you have to queue up to get close to them, for example, rather than free-standing for 360-degree circulation around. The artefacts aren't particularly impressive, and they don't do much with technology to bring them to life. Jorvik is a very long way behind Denmark's Jelling Viking Centre. A real shame, since it's only recently reopened after 18 months of refurbishment from flood damage. They don't seem to have taken the opportunity for any significant improvements. So ... worth a visit if you like Vikings and haven't spent a lot of time in Denmark, but questionable value for your £10.25. (Although that does get you repeat admission for a year. Anyone want two adult tickets good 'til December 2018?)

YORK MINSTER
It's one of England's blockbuster cathedrals and, as its archbishop is 2nd only to Canterbury, regularly holds services and events of national importance. Since English cathedrals charge admission (£10 for York, good for 1 year), it's always worth checking the event schedule. Pay for a concert, have a wander for free. We stumbled onto a glorious performance of Handel's Messiah. The only drawback: the last available seats were in the back row, where regular gusts from the door lowered the temperature in an already frigid building. This is, I suspect, is the most I've ever suffered for art. It was worth it. When everyone stands and the strains of the Hallelujah chorus fill the air, it's a religious experience in any setting. Hearing in a great cathedral makes it that much better.

Before the concert and at the intermission we were able to wander around. York has some of the cleanest lines of England's great cathedrals. There are no chantry chapels, sparse carved decoration, few paintings. Just white walls, a mostly-white ceiling and soaring gothic arches. It's a study in elegant simplicity. There's more detail to take in around the crossing beneath the spire. The choir screen is a magnificent genealogy of the Plantagenet kings. The restored roofs of the transepts feature some gorgeous bosses, and there are colourful Victorian neo-gothic chapels built into the arches of the transepts. The round chapter house is well worth a look. At this time of year, the most magnificent sight is the giant advent wreath, complete with real candles the height of a man, hanging below the crossing.

KATH WOHLFAHRT 

Perhaps the best Christmas shop in the world, and certainly a testament to the idea that nobody does this holiday better than the Bavarians. This German Christmas experience is even more fun because it  happens inside a rambling, historic half-timbered English town house from the late Middle Ages. Even if you don't want to shop, it's worth having a wander to check out the marvellous historic interiors. 

There are nutcrackers, cuckoo clocks, candle-driven spinning pyramids, incense smokers, nativity scenes and holiday linens ... in addition to at least four large rooms of tree decorations. There's one just for the kind of hand-blown, hand-painted glass ornaments brought back into fashion by Christopher Radko, portraying a staggering variety of subjects. All staffed by helpful ladies in dirndls and loden jackets. It's the company's only outlet in the UK. The only thing that could make it better? An adjacent German beer hall. (York is full of charming pubs, but we couldn't get a seat in any of them on this packed Saturday.) 

My husband proved a frustrating, though ultimately useful, restraint. Without him, I would have easily laid out several hundred pounds on Christmas decorations we don't need. Instead, we spent £20 on a blown glass tree topper we did. Everyone was happy.

FAIRFAX HOUSE

It takes either extreme audacity or supreme confidence to hang the claim that you are England's best Georgian townhouse outside your door. There's a lot of competition, and I was skeptical that anyone could beat Bath's No. 1 Royal Crescent. But I'll give my vote to Fairfax House. It's a slightly older style than Bath's restrained neo-classicism. Fairfax House's decoration dates from the 1760s and feels 20 years older: there's a heavy whiff of Baroque here. (Unsurprising for a proud, provincial Roman Catholic family.) It's worth visiting for the progression of ornate plaster ceilings alone.

The house is beautifully restored and furnished to the state it would have been in when the last Viscount Fairfax did the place up as an urban party palace in an attempt to entertain his way to a fiancé for his daughter. He didn't succeed, and she sold the place after his death. So the furnishings are representative, mostly from a collection that chocolate magnate Noel Terry willed to the house on his death in 1980. 

It's a fluke that the place still exists at all. Used as a club and cinema in the 1930s, it suffered removal of interior walls and suffocation of those glorious ceilings with high gloss paint. While the removal took thousands of painful hours, curators think the synthetic coat preserved exquisite details. A quirk of leases and local government saw the house shuttered, but unable to be occupied or torn down, through the '60s and '70s. Probably another lucky escape. Its rediscovery and reconstruction in the '80s is a fascinating story that well-informed room stewards will be happy to tell you. They also spin tales of Fairfax family history and have deep knowledge of how the furnishings would have worked in every day usage. I was completely captivated; my top sightseeing pick in York.

WHERE WE STAYED: NOVOTEL

Novotel is a pet-friendly hotel chain. They don't publicise it, but all members of the chain allow dogs for an extra fee of £10 per pet. This one has ample parking, generously-sized modern rooms, speedy free wi-fi and is a 10-minute walk to the centre of town. Even better for dog owners, it's also on the River Ouse and opens at the back onto a long river walk complete with street lamps and rubbish bins. Everything a dog owner could want.

Nuremberg fights to recover glorious history from Nazi shadows

I ended the last entry talking about the strange juxtaposition of idyllic German scenery with the Nazi evil that went on there.  The contrast deepens in Nuremberg, which is forced to balance its picture-postcard medieval cityscape with the dubious legacy of being at the heart of the Nazi PR machine.

We took a bus tour from Munich so that we could explore with the benefit of a guide.  (For details and whether it was worth the money, see the logistics entry at the bottom.)  It makes for a strange day.  The Nazi sites are grimly fascinating and emotionally difficult.  The town centre is visually rich and robustly cheerful. The tour wisely covered the Nazi history first.

We started out at the Nazi Party Rally Grounds.  Like most people, I'd seen the films of the massive gatherings dominated by Hitler's messianic preaching.  I knew the drama of these events was a major plank in the Party's marketing offensive. I knew they were big. I didn't realise how big. This wasn't just a single parade ground, but something more like an Olympic Park for Nazi Party festivals with a whole range of stadia, rally grounds and cultural facilities. People came here for days to drink in the intoxicating liquor of success and national pride in fellowship with thousands just like them.  Most of these buildings have been torn down and the land given over to other things, but the main marching ground (the Zeppelinfeld) and the Congress Hall remain.  They're now put to effective use in an earnest educational programme across Germany to remind people of the horror in an attempt to stop history from repeating itself.

There's no denying that architect Albert Speer was a genius at using architecture to manipulate emotion. Even in its ruined state, it's easy to see how the main stand with its Roman Imperial styling, soaring white walls and noble columns would inspire reverence. Between photos and our guide's descriptions, we learned how the organisers used the stage set and powerful lighting to create a quasi-religious experience. Step to the front of the plinth from which Hitler once addressed the crowds, take in the weeds growing through the cracking concrete and the school groups learning the history, and most people will have a sense of grim satisfaction. Sic mundi gloria transit. The glory of the world is fleeting. And nobody deserved it to flee faster than this lot.

Not for the faint-hearted
Things get even more thought provoking inside the Congress Hall.  More mock Roman architecture here: a massive half-circle of a building with a three-tiered, Colosseum-copying façade. Today you'll find the Documentation Centre here, a museum that provides a powerful, no-holds-barred exploration of what happened in Nuremberg, and why. The building itself makes a dramatic statement, designed so that some of the galleries jut from the original edifice in glass and steel extensions designed to look like stakes driven through this architectural heart of Nazism.  Inside, audio guides come in a wide variety of languages so nobody is left out.  Displays explained the environment that allowed the rise of the Nazi party, how they went about claiming power, and then how they manipulated everything to keep it. Here, of course, is where there are several specific rooms about Nuremberg's place in the story. The Nazis were trying to appropriate aura of this imperial capital from Germany's medieval glory days.

The designers of the Documentation Centre manipulate emotions just as efficiently as Albert Speer once did, though can be forgiven considering their purpose.  As the story gets darker, so does the lighting. Prejudice, concentration camps and genocide come near the end.  You enter the gallery that lays out the worst of the crimes through a dim brick tunnel that slants slightly downward.  Other tunnels stretch away on the sides and, at the end of each, near life-sized photos of piles of emaciated dead bodies fill archways. It's an emotional punch in the gut, and not for the faint hearted.  Your stomach will churn further as you reach the Nuremberg Trials section and see how little remorse any of these men felt for their crimes. Most, in fact, didn't even acknowledge they'd done anything wrong. The designers grant you some respite here, allowing you to step outdoors to look down on the open, decaying amphitheatre of the former Congress Hall. 

I thought I'd composed myself, stepped back in, and was greeted by the final display.  Behind a glass wall, two lines made of neon light ... clearly meant to represent train tracks ... stretch to the distance. The names of the death camps line the wall. It takes a while for your eyes to adjust, and then you see that the tracks are laid not onto the usual white rocks, but onto thousands of ID labels each containing the name of someone taken to a camp to be murdered by the Nazis. At this point all the horror caught up with me and I confess I broke into some fairly substantial tears as I made my way out of the building. I've never been so emotionally overwhelmed by a museum. Which is, I think, the whole point of the place.

The Documentation Centre left an indelible mark on me, as I'm sure it does to each visitor.  I'd like to think such efforts have pushed Western society past any possibility of a repeat. But there was plenty in the Documentation Centre that reminded me too much of the present.  A widening gulf between rich and poor created tensions the Nazis exploited.  People worried about their futures were drawn to glamour, celebrity and easy answers. Fractious political parties, unable to get along, opened the door for a dangerous outsider.  Circumstances made it acceptable to criticise one religious group.
Sound familiar? I couldn't help thinking about how completely normal it seems to have become in America to levy broad-brush criticisms of Muslims. On the other side of the religious divide, anti-Semitism is rising.  And we've seen plenty of genocide in the news in the past few decades.  The Germans are doing a noble job trying to warn the world not to repeat history. I'm not sure it's working.

Fantasy on the Pegnitz
Emotionally drained, I needed a complete change of pace. Nuremberg town centre, with its streets plucked straight from Disney's Fantasy Land, does the job. Most of the town was flattened by bombs at the end of the war. The modern reconstruction accounts for the pristine condition and bright colours.

Local architecture features a lot of tall houses with complex half timbering. Some buildings are enhanced by beautiful paintings. Ornate wrought iron signs, statues of saints on plinths, bloom-heavy window boxes and fanciful towers and rooflines add variety.  Two austere early gothic churches tower over the centre of town, the heart of which is a big market square filled with a great variety of market stalls featuring many fine craftsmen. The Christmas market here is supposed to be one of the best in Europe. Seeing how good the market was on an unremarkable day in September, I'd love to get back for the main event. 

The town is circled by medieval walls and bisected by the river Pegnitz that offers plenty of charming waterfronts. It's all overlooked by a striking castle on a hill. This was one of the great capitals of the Holy Roman Empire in the middle ages, and the Imperial Palace is one of the blockbuster sights here. We climbed up to it and admired its impressive bastions, picturesque roofline and the great views from its ramparts, but didn't have time to get inside.

Nor did we have time for any of the museums, of which there are many. This was a celebrated centre of humanistic learning. No wonder it gave birth to Albrecht Durer, whose house you can tour. On a more frivolous note, one of the best toy museums in the world is here ... celebrating centuries at the heart of toy production.

We did try both of the local culinary specialities. Nuremberger sausages are longer and thinner than the usual. Tasty, though I'm not sure I'd say they were that much better than others. The local gingerbread, or lebkuchen, is much celebrated. I admit I was underwhelmed, finding it dry and lacking in flavour ... even though I went out of my way to acquire it from Schmidt's, which the locals all swear is the best.  (My own gingerbread recipe is dark, moist and chewy from lashings of molasses and studded with chopped, candied ginger, so I wasn't likely to appreciate the German version's subtlety.)

While I don't hunger to return to the cuisine, one taste of Nuremberg's city centre was not enough.  It deserves two full days on its own. A long weekend including the Christmas market is now on my bucket list.

LOGISTICS

We took the Gray Line bus tour from Munich station, which left at 8:30 and had us back in town around 5:30.  On the plus side, it included guided sightseeing on the way out of town and commentary on a range of topics as we drove.  The Rally Grounds and the Documentation Centre are some way out of town, so it was helpful to have transport.  Nuremberg's also much bigger than I expected, so the bus allowed us to see a run of city walls and buildings around the periphery we wouldn't have passed on foot. With just a few hours in town, only a guided tour could ensure that you laid eyes on all the key sights.

But with advance planning, we could have done a better job on our own for about the same price.  Express trains from Munich take about an hour each way, half of the time you spend on the bus. We would have needed to take taxis to the Nazi sites, but could then have spent more time exploring the Documentation Centre.  Most importantly, we could have spent more time in the town centre. The walking tour was exhausting, covering several miles at a rapid pace and including steep climbs up to and down from the castle.  The guide was often so far ahead of us we couldn't hear much of her commentary. We might not have seen as much, but we'd have been better on our own with a guidebook. Liberated from the tyranny of the bus schedule, we could have stayed much longer than the three hours we had in the town centre.

We should have taken the train.