[German] Christmas Markets

When it comes to holidays and Germany, everyone almost always brings up Christmas Markets in Germany!

Lucky for us, we love a good reason to get out and explore and I LOVE all things Christmas so this was something I was especially looking forward to this holiday season.

Usually the markets open the later half of November, and go through Christmas, some even go into the early new year. Which means we’d have about a month to explore as many of the local ones that we can get to and over the next two years to finish hitting up the rest of the list!

Notable mention for military families: In addition to Christmas Markets, this is the season for a ton of Military hosted Bazaars across the bases in Germany, so make sure to keep an eye out for those! For example, we had ours here on Hohenfels November 18-20!

Unfortunately though, what actually happened this last year was totally different. We were lucky enough to get into one market each though!

I coordinated with our awesome neighbors to check out the Romantic Christmas Market at Thurn und Taxis Palace in Regensburg Germany and AJ, who tried to spend his time “getting ahead on Christmas Shopping,” stumbled across one in Bayreuth Germany.

While our two smaller markets were nothing near the traditionally popular ones, we’re glad we at least got to start our Christmas mug collection by drinking Glühwein at the markets and ended the season with 4 mugs!

What is Glühwein? It’s a mulled wine that is served warm and can even come with fun additions like alcoholic floaters or fruits.

For reference, my loving husband was able to locate a pretty helpful list of Christmas Markets we were using to plan, but at the very least you can get an idea just how serious Christmas Markets are here in Europe, not just Germany! European Christmas Markets.