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• St Paul's College Christmas Ball 2019
• St Paul Christmas Market Depot
• Christmas College St Paul Varennes

Experiencing a Christmas Market is one of the highlights of the holiday season!

Experiencing a Christmas Market is one of the highlights of the holiday season in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and in other European countries.

These open-air festivals date back some seven centuries and the European Christmas Market (ECM) will revive this cultural tradition and bring its sights, sounds, and aromas to downtown St. Paul, Minnesota.

Since the Middle Ages, towns in the German-speaking part of Europe have held Christmas Markets in their market squares.

Dresden‘s Strietzelmarkt was first held in 1434. The Christmas markets of Bautzen (first held in 1384), Frankfurt (first mentioned in 1393) and Munich (1310) were even older.

The Vienna “December market” was a kind of forerunner of the Christmas market and dates back to 1294, but it wasn’t so much a Christmas Market as a December Market at that point in time and became a Christmas market in later years.

The German name for a Christmas market often is “Christkindlmarkt” or “Weihnachtsmarkt”. The last name simply means “Christmas market” whereas the first name originates from the tale of the Christkind or Christchild. In many locales on opening nights, onlookers welcome the “Christkind“, or boy Jesus, that is acted out by a local child.

In other towns, the Christkind is normally depicted in a white and gold robe with a crown atop her blond hair and angelic wings.

Depending on the region and family tradition, the Weihnachtsmann (Father Christmas or Santa Claus) or the “Christkind” is the bearer of gifts for children on Christmas Eve; the Christkind even brings the Christmas tree.

Children never see the Christkind in person, they even are told that Christkind will not come and bring presents if they are too curious and try to spot it.

The Christmas tree allegedly brought by the Christkind, is put up in the living room in secret by the parents, and the family enters for the opening of presents when the parents say that they think that the Christkind has left again.

In some traditions, the departure is announced by the ringing of a small bell, which the parents pretend to have heard of which is secretly done by one of the adults in the family.

This tradition of the Christkindl is known among German-speaking countries such as

• Germany
• Austria
• Switzerland
• Czech Republic
• Italy
• Liechtenstein
• Ireland
• England
• Scandinavian countries

These Christmas markets occur during Advent, which runs approximately from our Thanksgiving holiday through Christmas Eve.

It is during that time that rustic timber booths draped with fragrant evergreen boughs line the town squares and it is here that vendors and artists sell items such as toys, blown-glass ornaments, cones of warm sugared almonds and steaming mugs of Glühwein (spiced mulled wine) to holiday shoppers, accompanied by traditional singing and dancing.

Experiencing a Christmas Market is one of the highlights of the Holiday season in these European countries. Minnesotans primarily are of Germanic and Scandinavian heritage which also holds true for the remaining four states in this five-state region, with Germans in Iowa accounting for some 35%, 40% in South Dakota, 44% in North Dakota, and 42% in Wisconsin, based on the 2004 U.S. Census Bureau Report.

Notwithstanding this large population base with Germanic roots, until recently there have been few Germanic arts and cultural offerings in the Minnesota area.

These European open-air Christmas festivals date back some seven centuries and ECM will revive this cultural tradition and bring its sights, sounds, and aromas to downtown Saint Paul.

ECM will address also the concern of some about the over-commercialization of Christmas and restore the cultural emphasis on family and friends. Also, something special is the Krampus and we encourage you to learn more about the Krampus tradition.

*This information was collected primarily from Wikipedia and attested to by German immigrants.

St Paul's College Christmas Ball 2019

Informant: “In Sicily, well in other places in Italy sometimes too, but really in Sicily, on the Eve of the big holidays, so like Christmas Eve and New Years Eve, you’re supposed to eat fish, but in particular on Christmas eve. It was called the Feast of the Seven Fishes, though I actually think in Sicily they called it La Vigilia, for The Vigil. The real tradition is that you’re supposed to make seven types of seafood. So in Sicily, my mom and dad they always did this, so they would start cooking a few days before Christmas Eve. When we were growing up in Los Angeles, we would go down to Redondo Beach and my mom would buy all these fishes very similar to the fishes they would have in Sicily, so she would make calamari, like deep fried calamari. Oh, and one of the things she would buy is called baccala, which is like a dry, salted cod. I’ve actually seen it in some Italian places in St. Paul, they sell it in what looks like a big bucket, and it looks like just dried fish, and so you have to soak it in water overnight, and then you have to drain the water, and then you have to soak it again, and so basically you’re reconstituting the fish. And I think a lot of times people in Sicily have that one because there are a lot of poor people, and that kind of fish was really cheap. And so [my mother] would do that whole thing day after day after day, and then she would make this sauce that she would put this fish in like this tomato sauce, and then she would bake it. So she did baccala, she did calamari, she always did octopus salad. She would never make the kind of fishes that [my family has] like salmon, I never had salmon growing up. She would make these things called sand dabs, they looked like a kind of flatfish and she’d fry them, and anchovies and sardines, and she’d make this pasta with fennel and tuna sometimes… But she had enough fish to feed an army, when there were only six of us, but that’s very typical though in Sicily…What other fish did she make… oh, eel! She would always make eel. And I would have continued this tradition, except that [my children] don’t eat as much fish, that’s why I sort of incorporated it into [my family’s traditions], that’s why we always have fish on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve, so some years I would make stuffed salmon with crab and so on, but I found that [my family] just really liked crab, so that’s why we always have crab, and I figured, that was close enough.”

St Paul Christmas Market Depot

Collector: Was the exact number of fishes significant?

Christmas College St Paul Varennes

Informant: “Well, so it was feast of the seven fishes, though sometime we’d do nine, eleven, thirteen, but it’s always an odd number. I’m not really sure why, but it was supposed to have something to do with luck, like you’re never supposed to do an even number. As for fish, I guess with Sicily being an island, it was really easy for people to just go out and catch fish, and so that’s why they had fish.”