Today is the last day of the first-ever Belleville Christkindlmarkt.

Ever since we moved to this town in 2006, I’ve told Ryan every Christmas that I don’t understand why Belleville didn’t have one. The town square is the perfect location for it, and there’s already a lot of Christmas festivities going on down there. Belleville is also very proud of her German heritage, so it seemed like a no-brainer to me.

This year, to celebrate the city’s 200th birthday, I finally got my wish…a Christkindlmarkt set up on two quadrants of the town square. It was pretty much exactly like I imagined it, right down to the specially designed mugs for Gluhwein!

There were some lovely stalls selling some wonderfully unique gifts:

On the weekends, different groups performed on the square, like the O’Fallon High School madrigals:

They also periodically had demonstrations of different crafts, like this Sole Survivor leather work demonstration:

A pair of reindeer visited (Prancer and Sven), and we even got to see them lock antlers!

And with the reindeer came a beautiful, antique sleigh:

It really was just like I dreamed it. And every time I was down there, (many times over the last few weeks), night or day, it was busy, even in bad weather. I’m hopeful that this wasn’t just the first-ever, but the first-annual Christkindlmarkt on our town square…I’d love for it to be part of our Christmas traditions for many years to come!