Our Blog - Strasbourg Marche de Noel

Strasbourg has one of the oldest Christmas markets, dating back to 1570. The name, Christkindelsmärik, means market of the baby Jesus. It has moved locations to various squares around town and today, the full Christmas Market takes place in 11 different locations. In 1992, the city of Strasbourg proclaimed itself the "Capital of Christmas" and expanded it to what it is today.

The main historical part of the city gets into the act, with almost every building decorated in some fashion or the other. Some are more festive than others but all of them are entertaining. There were lots and lots of teddy bears decorating the fronts of buildings, but I think the most interesting are the flying pigs as well as the pigs that were cooking.

Place Kléber is the central square in the city and is named after general Jean-Baptist Kléber who was born in Strasbourg in 1753. It was originally named Barfüsserplatz ("square of the barefoot nuns" in German) because there used to be a Franciscan monastery here. During the Christmas Market, a huge fir tree is put up every year that comes from the Vosges mountains.

At the beginning of each evening, there is a "lighting" of the Christmas tree in the place, and we stopped by one day to get a video of it. It starts relatively slow, but you can start seeing the various colors, then balls of light, then the whole tree.

And then there are also the lights ... with different streets having different sets of lights hanging down the road.

We also took a couple pictures of the river at night as we came back to our little B&B.

While they are not snow-covered, all of the Christmas market stalls are these little wooden chalets. The "traditional" Christkindelsmärik is at Place Broglie

I didn't do very good with these pictures or videos, but within the courtyard of the Rohan Palace, they had a "living creche" or a living nativity scene. They had kids that would play the shepherds as well as a few animals happily chomping on hay. We thought it a little interesting that they were playing English-language music :-)

Now the sad and/or disturbing part. We arrived the day after a terrorist attack took place, where multiple people were killed. There were several memorials setup where people put flowers, candles, and words of support. As you can imagine, the police presence was ramped up and we had a lot more security and checkpoints. Some of the signs at a memorials said "Tous unis contre la Barbarie", or "All united against barbarism" and "Un Noël sans terreur" or "A Christmas without terror".