We all have memories of how holidays used to be, and walking down Nuremberg's Königstrasse toward Germany's most famous Christmas market is like following a path back to them. Strolling past the St. Lorenz Church one chilly December afternoon, I see stalls outside the church selling mistletoe and wreaths of ribboned fir. The old-fashioned streetlamps are festooned with stars, as if transplanted from Dickens's London, while across the Pegnitz, the river that cuts the city in half, a huge angel of gold foil hangs over the crowds. As I round the corner into the Hauptmarkt, the great medieval square in front of the Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady), I hear the hurdy-gurdy sound of an old steam carousel. The smells of spices, sausages, and Glühwein (mulled wine) thread through the cold air like laughter at a skating party. At one end of the square, on a stage beneath the church's soaring façade, a children's choir sings traditional carols; at the other end, an old mail coach, filled with waving passengers, rattles past the 600-year-old Gothic spire of the Schöner Brunnen, the so-called Beautiful Fountain, one of the city's first pipe-fed wells. As I elbow my way into the makeshift village of wooden stalls, trimmed in striped canvas and sitting in the shadow of the Kaiserburg—the old castle where the German kings of the Holy Roman Empire once held court—Nuremberg's vast Christkindlesmarkt ("Christ Child's Market") seems not only a joyful survival from holidays past but also a memorial to the entire history of the celebration.
Founded as a trade fair in the early 16th century, the Christkindlesmarkt is a deliberate throwback. There is no plastic and no canned music here. No fairground franchises. No goods stacked in cardboard boxes. Instead, the candy stands and toymakers, the bakers, carpenters, metalworkers, and dozens of other tradespeople sell nothing that isn't traditional or handmade in the 200 or so stalls, most with age-old names that have a quaint ring to them—At the Prune Man's or To the Doll's Kitchen.
Opened each year by a local teen dressed as the Christ Child, the fair is a perfect place to buy tree decorations, crèche figures, and presents for your children's stockings, a place full of the delights of waking up on Christmas morning. As I prowl through the lanes between the stalls, savoring the aroma of my spiced blueberry Glühwein, I spot a wreath of gilded wheat ears for my wife, an oil lamp transformed into a fire-breathing dragon for my daughter, and a little angel made of curly wood shavings just for me.
Before I even realize it, I am laden not only with presents but with half a dozen Zwetschgenmännle—little figures, carrying ladders and umbrellas, that are made of dried figs, walnuts, and prunes. Like everything else on sale here, the Zwetschgenmännle are part of local tradition. The gold-foil angel, which is synonymous with German Christmas, was first fashioned in Nuremberg by a 17th-century dollmaker, part of a fraternity of craftsmen dating back to the Middle Ages. Many of the wooden playthings on the stands are replicas of originals now housed in the city's toy museum.
Even the food stalls provide an insight into the city's history. Sauerkraut here is sweeter than elsewhere and rich with caraway seeds, juniper berries, and wine. The local bratwurst—thin, heady with marjoram, and each about ten inches long—were almost certainly the snack of choice for the legendary Meistersingers, who performed in the city throughout the 15th and 16th centuries. At that time, Nuremberg, the home of the painter and engraver Albrecht Dürer, was one of the most important cultural centers in Europe (Munich was still a country crossroads). Slender bratwurst were first made, one stallholder says, to be fed to prisoners or visitors who arrived outside the city gates after curfew. "They had to fit through the keyhole," he says, holding one up with tongs.
For the most celebrated of all Nuremberg's Christmas treats, lebkuchen (spice cakes and cookies), I pay a call at the Craftsmen's Courtyard, beneath the city's medieval ramparts, where a baker in period costume is rolling out dough onto trays to be fed into a brick oven. He works for Lebkuchen-Schmidt, the most famous maker of lebkuchen in the city. "Every baker in the city has his own recipe, and they're all secret," he says. "All I can tell you is that our dough is made with honey and twelve different spices—five more than were used when these 'cakes of life' were first baked by local monks." I later read that the original spices represented one spice for each day of creation.
Back in the market proper, again with a mug of Glühwein in hand, I wander once more through the laughing, sipping, steam-breathing crowds. Eventually, I clamber up to the Kaiserburg, where thousands of Nuremberg's children, carrying lanterns, enact parts of the Christmas story every year. I gaze with awe at the vast numbers of crèches from all over the world that are placed not only in the old churches but along one of the streets and into the Craftsmen's Courtyard. I continue on my ramble, looking in at Children's Land, where I pop into houses that are alive with cookie making, candle pulling, and all kinds of playacting. In an old chapel in the medieval Heilig-Geist Hospital (now a home for the elderly), a romantic fairy tale of a building straddling the river, I find the Christ Child herself, in golden robes and curls, reading a treasured old Christmas story to a wide-eyed audience of adults and children who have come in out of the cold.
And I begin to think of the Christkindlesmarkt as the ultimate hands-on museum—not only a repository of the best things about Christmas but also a reminder of the simple spirit in which the holiday was once celebrated. As the Christ Child says when she opens the market: "It is the children of this world, and the poor, who know best what giving's for. You men and women, who once yourselves were children, be them again today, happy as children be."
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