Reflections on the First Christmas Markets of 2009

Yesterday was Thanksgiving Day for Americans. Since Samantha, Benjamin, and I had celebrated the holiday with our Home Group last week, we decided to take a short trip to Leipzig and to Dresden for our first Christmas markets of 2009. We had a nice time, but it occured to me that there are between 150-200 booths at any given Christmas market all selling essentially the same things.

There are basically 6 types of booths at a Christmas market with a few novelities thrown in for fun.

- there are food booths of two types..."food you eat now" and "food you eat later"
- there's the carved wood booth...usually about 20 variations of this same booth
- there's the medieval/fantasy booth...because nothing says Christmas like a black dragon holding a candle
- there's the table linens and lace booth
- there's the toy sellers
- there's the seller of hats, coats, and gloves...which cater to people like me who think they can tough it out and then realize 15 minutes after arriving they wish they'd brought a pair of gloves and a hat.

If you go during the day you avoid the press of humanity, but you miss out on the "holiday magic"...because nothing generates Christmas cheer quite like the entire population of the city all gathered in one square block of land.

So it occurs to me to ask the question...after centuries of German Christmas markets, what makes people continue to go to these things? And it seems to me that deep down maybe it is the need to believe in something, so we go in search of something to make our lives magical for even just a few brief moments.

Nothing sparks in us the hunger to believe quite like this season of the year. So we gather in large masses of people, all wandering around booths all selling the same things to the same groups of people who have been coming for decades...because they need a sense of magic...a sense of the miraculous...in their lives.

Maybe there's something in us that needs miracles, and living in a world that has to explain away everything miraculous leaves us all a little less...human.

But maybe that's just me...