There is truly nothing like December in Germany. Everywhere you go, big or small, Christmas decorations and string lights are up and there is always a hut filled with mulled wine and bratwurst. This year we got to hit up some new markets and celebrated this month in our state of North Rhine-Westphalia!
Cologne, Germany
We love the city of Cologne so we were excited to finally see its markets! We went the very end of November to ring in the market season!
Barendorf, Iserlohn
There is this tiny village that used to be textile factories that is just down the street from our house! This was by far my most favorite market of the year. It was so quaint and cozy and there was even a wood-makers house that was serving up HOMEMADE family-recipe glühwine! We couldn’t get enough.
Münster, Germany
Münster is about an hour from our home and since we visited it over the summer we were excited to go back to this beautiful town and check out their market! It definitely didn’t disappoint – Münster is such a great German (with a little touch of Holland) city!
Dortmund, Germany
Dortmund is Iserlohn’s big city and a huge place to go shopping and home to Germany’s famous soccer team. We heard that Dortmund had the world’s LARGEST Christmas tree (made up of over 1,700 individual trees) and you could say it was pretty cool. Oh, also, they just opened a Five Guys (very few in Germany) here a few weeks ago so yes, we go to Dortmund often.
Lüdenscheid, Germany
Chris’ team had a team event happening at this market so they let families jump on the bus to this town about 40 minutes away. It was very small and very cold this day but me and my girl Steph stayed warm with glühwine.
Hagen, Germany
Only twenty minutes from our house, Hagen is the home of Vapianos and TK Maxx – so we go here a lot. On a visit to get a Christmas candle at TK Maxx, we walked around their surprisingly big market and shared a bratwurst.
Iserlohn Living
While our town has a very small Christmas market, we’ve been busy keeping on with our Christmas traditions – decorating cookies, watching Christmas movies almost every night, listing to my keggsmas playlist nonstop (3 years running) and this year since Chris has been injured the last few games, I put him to work to help me with our homemade pierogi making! I think I let him make about a dozen before I stepped in and took over the rest 😆. We miss everyone at home and we definitely miss the snow (it’s been in the 50s here!). Luckily, the home we have makes Christmas a magical time to forget about our homesick sadness this time of year. ❤️🎄
the always gone girl 