One of the highlights of my visit to Chicago last week was a visit to the Christkindlmarket, which opened on Nov. 20 and will run through Christmas Eve. Held on Daley Plaza for 17 years and billed as the largest traditional Christmas market outside Germany, the market booths surround the plaza’s Picasso sculpture — a slightly jarring juxtaposition of the modern and traditional, but it’s a lively, cheerful scene. We arrived just as the market opened (11 a.m.) on a chilly but sunny Monday morning and were immediately greeted by tantalizing scents of sweet and savory temptations from the food booths.

As tempting as all those goodies were, we determined to attend to our shopping first. As the name suggests, the market’s template is drawn from the holiday markets one finds in German cities and towns at this time of year, and the majority of the merchants selling crafts, gifts and handmade specialty items are German. One could buy wooden toys from Dresden, Bavarian pewter ornaments from München, wooden cuckoo clocks from the Black Forest, beer steins from Jössnitz and lace-adorned linens from Sachsen. The products were genuine imports, and I found in talking with the shopkeepers that many of them had traveled to the States to sell their items and were not merely local temps hired to work the market.

I also discovered that the market sponsors merchants from all over the world. I purchased a charming matryoshka doll from the Ukrainian and Russian Shop and found several booths offering Polish handicrafts. Further explorations unearthed olive wooden nativity products from Bethlehem, Israel; folk art from Mexico; jewelry and scarves from Peru; alpaca wool sweaters and accessories from Ecuador; and Native American pottery from Pueblo and Navajo tribes.

My one regret is that by the time we finished poking into nearly every booth, we wearily opted for lunch at a sit-down restaurant nearby rather than trying to choose a meal from all the delicious options, although the Lufthansa Festival Tent offered heated seating. I guess I’ll just figure that my next trip to Chicago during the holidays will require a Christkindlmarket excursion solely devoted to pretzels, sausage, Schnitzel, strudel, stollen and Glühwein!

If your travels take you to Chicago this month, I’d highly recommend a visit to the market, especially as it is conveniently located in the heart of the Loop. On Dec. 8 the market hosts the German National Tourist Office‘s 8th Annual Consumer Travel Show, so you could gather information for a trip while immersing yourself in a bit of the culture.

— Patty Vanikiotis, asssociate editor/copy editor