Over the past eleven years, your humble blogger and his lovely wife have made many trips to Chicago in the Christmas season, and we always find the time to visit Chicago’s Christkindl Market, one of the biggest traditional German holiday festivals in the US. In the tradition of the German town fairs of the holiday season, this Christkindlmarket is set up in the historic Daley Plaza, in the shadow of the famous Picasso sculpture. This pop-up market runs from before Thanksgiving until Christmas Eve, every year.

For today’s entry in The 12 Posts of Christmas, we’re going to go back and bring you a batch of photos from our visits over the years.

Enjoy!

This is the main entrance. Pro-tip: Don’t wait in line for them to open this one. There are three other entrances and if you get there right when they open, it’s way quicker to go to one of those. At least it was that way until this year, when they decided to only have one entrance and limit how many people got in at a time.

The problem with running this photo is that now I really want a pretzel stuffed with spinach and feta, and I’ve never seen them for sale anywhere around here.

Oodles of ornaments, in this case at particularly high prices. I’m surprised they didn’t charge me just to take the picture.

Once a mere two-day pop-up booth, Krampus is now represented full time with his own line of holiday goodies.

This 2016 image of Christkindlmarket shows a certain element of inclusiveness as the festive Atheist “A” is set up right next to the Nativity, reminding us that “peace to all,” really means “peace to all.” I don’t think that was there this year.

This all happens under the watchful eye of the Picasso.

Inside Frank’s Ornament House,: “Look at that one!” loudly exclaimed finger-pointy in my shot man.

Sometimes they have a second Christkindl Market at Wrigley Field.

I have to admit, the Wrigley location looks spectacular after dark.

So we’ll wrap this up with one last look at the Wrigley Christkindl Market at night.