Cologne and Strasbourg - Christmas Markets, Lights, and Kinderpunsch

Some trips you plan for months. This one we backed into: a couple of winter days that opened up in December, and a long-standing itch to see the European Christmas markets done properly. We picked two cities that could hardly be more different in size or mood but share the same December religion. Cologne, all Gothic weight and Rhineland practicality. And Strasbourg, which has been calling itself the Capital of Christmas for long enough to actually mean it.

Cologne, under the cathedral

You do not so much arrive in Cologne as arrive underneath its cathedral. The Kölner Dom is one of those buildings that refuses to fit inside a photograph or inside your head. Two enormous blackened spires, all filigree and menace, that took six centuries to finish and look every day of it. You come up out of the train station and it is just there, filling the whole sky, close enough to touch and far too big to take in. We stood at the base of it for a while doing the thing everyone does, tilting our heads all the way back and still not finding the top.

The market that matters most sits right at the cathedral's feet. There is something about a Christmas market held in the shadow of a thousand-year-old Gothic pile that puts the fairy lights in perspective. Wooden chalets in tight rows, a tall tree strung with warm light, the smell of roasting almonds and cinnamon and hot sugar hanging over everything, and above it all the Dom, floodlit and indifferent. Cologne runs several markets across the old town, and we wandered between them as the afternoon light went, but it was the one under the cathedral we kept coming back to.

The Rhineland has a gift we did not expect: reibekuchen. Potato fritters, grated and fried crisp, served three to a paper plate with a dollop of apple sauce. Completely vegetarian, completely delicious, and exactly the kind of hot, greasy, uncomplicated thing you want in your hands when it is three degrees and getting dark at four in the afternoon. We ate them more than once, and then a few more times than that.

After dark the markets change character. One of the squares had been given over to a canopy of deep blue lights, great glowing orbs hung over the street, which turned the whole space cold and dreamlike in a way the warm-white markets never do.

The stalls themselves are half the fun even when you are not buying. One had built an entire miniature village under a blanket of fake snow and moss, tiny lit gingerbread-style houses stacked on a hillside, the sort of thing you look at for a full minute before you realise you have been grinning the whole time.

Strasbourg, the Capital of Christmas

Then we crossed into Alsace, and everything got smaller and older and, somehow, even more festive.

Strasbourg has run a Christmas market since 1570, which makes it one of the oldest in Europe, and the city does not let you forget it. The whole old town, a knot of half-timbered houses leaning over cobbled lanes, gets dressed for the season with an enthusiasm that borders on the unhinged. Not just the market squares. Entire building facades disappear under garlands, baubles, red stars, and more lights than seem structurally advisable.

The facades are the thing I will remember. One restaurant had turned its front into a wall of red-framed windows and greenery. Another, a proper old winstub, had buried its whole timber frontage under garlands and giant gold and red stars until you could barely find the door. It is competitive, clearly, this business of decorating, and the whole city wins.

And then there are the bears. For reasons I did not fully understand and did not need to, several streets had hung enormous plush teddy bears from their upper storeys, dozens of them, clinging to balconies and ledges and each other high above the crowd. It is completely absurd and completely wonderful, and my wife made me stop so she could photograph nearly all of them.

We drifted through the lanes with no real plan, which is the correct way to do Strasbourg. Down toward La Petite France, where the canals and the old tanners' houses are, past a lantern-hung street that looked like a film set, and at one point ducking out of the cold into a great glowing dome of lights just to warm up and look up.

Eating our way through, our way

Now, the food, and the thing I promised to come back to.

Going into this, the honest worry was that two vegetarians who do not drink would spend four days smelling other people's dinners. Christmas markets have a reputation as sausage-and-glühwein affairs, and a lot of the stalls are exactly that. But once you stop looking at what you cannot have and start looking at what you can, the picture changes completely.

The vegetarian haul, across both cities, was genuinely excellent:

• Reibekuchen and kartoffelpuffer - the potato fritters, our Cologne discovery, with apple sauce.
• Raclette and tartiflette-style cheese plates, melted over potato and bread.
• Bretzels the size of your face, and warm.
• Crêpes, sweet ones, folded around chocolate or chestnut cream.
• Roasted chestnuts and candied almonds by the bagful, mostly bought for the warmth of holding them.
• Lebkuchen and gingerbread, the edible and the purely decorative kinds.

And for the drinking, which at a Christmas market is really about holding something hot while you walk, we did fine without a drop of alcohol. Nearly every glühwein stall also pours kinderpunsch, a spiced fruit punch, warm and red and Christmassy, minus the wine. Where there was that, there was usually hot apple juice and thick hot chocolate too. We worked out quickly which stalls did the good kinderpunsch and became loyal to them.

The one thing to know, if you travel the way we do, is that the Alsatian house dish, tarte flambée, traditionally comes with bacon, so we mostly left it alone. But that was the only real miss. Everything else, we ate. For two people braced for a hungry few days, it was a very pleasant surprise, and a reminder that the meat-and-wine version of these markets is only one version.

Two cities, one winter

Cologne and Strasbourg do the same festival in two different accents. Cologne is grand and slightly gruff, its market a small bright thing at the foot of an enormous dark cathedral, the whole effect a little austere and all the better for it. Strasbourg is warmer and more theatrical, a whole old town that has decided, collectively, to show off, and does. One is a cathedral with a market. The other is a market with a city wrapped around it.

We came home cold, a little footsore, and smelling faintly of cinnamon and fried potato, which is about the best way to come home from anywhere in December. The list of markets we still want to see got longer, not shorter.

Next winter trip, we might do it all over again!