Market Day

At the turn of the hour when the days start lengthening again, the Christmas Markets come!

Of all German contributions to Winterval festivities this one is perhaps the most unusual. While Tannenbaums and advent wreathes and a host of Christmas curios have arguably rather ancient origins, the mid-winter market is a decidedly more recent affair. Its earliest incarnation is likely Dresden 1434, where a the town market was opened for a single day on Christmas Eve. Later, Nuremberg and Berlin, and practically every other German huddle had a market of its own, hawking wares and even boosting local artisans. Which raises the question — why?

Looking at the event in the year of our Lord 2024, the answer seems to be blindingly obvious — it’s just good business. Holiday cheer and a few glasses of glühwien make for a very lucrative affair (for one half of the market body, at any rate). But pushing back to the halcyon days of the fifteenth century, this does not seem likely. A pre-, or at most proto-, capitalist society doesn’t have much use of speculative splurging, especially when goods are scarce and snows abundant.

A clue to what the market is all about can be seen in the several posts right in this Advent Calendar — from boy bishops to tropical saturnalias, this time of the year is one where reversals abound, not just for the sake of a good joke, but because the rhythms of the seasons themselves seem to show it. Once past the Solstice, the days lengthen again, but the weather remains as miserable as ever; and for medieval-man, their stores may be depleted, but they have survived and made the turn. In this, a Christmas Market is not so much a celebration of excess, but a promise of what is to come — the next year, the next spring, and the next harvest.

With but two days left in Advent, may the markets and the merriment be as twisty-turny as the middle-ages that spawned them!

Illustration: J.S.L. Halle, ‘Engraving of the Christmas market in Berlin, Germany, 1796’ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ChristmarktBerlin1796.jpg