Christkindlmarket Chicago at Daley Plaza

About This Event

Christkindlmarket Chicago is the reason half the Loop smells like cinnamon and mulled wine from Thanksgiving week through Christmas Eve — more than 1 million visitors a year come through Daley Plaza's rows of red-and-white striped wooden chalets for German ornaments, wool goods, bratwurst, and Glühwein. Free to walk through, open daily with shorter hours on Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve, and 2026 marks its 30th year in Chicago.

It didn't start here, or even start as a Chicago idea. Nürnberg, Germany has run a Christkindlesmarkt since the 1600s — one of the oldest and largest Christmas markets in the world, still pulling about two million visitors a year — and in 1996 Chicago's own German American Chamber of Commerce brought the concept over, setting up shop on Pioneer Court outside the Wrigley Building to help promote German-American trade. Mayor Richard M. Daley liked it enough to ask organizers to move it to the plaza that now bears his father's name the very next year, and it's been there ever since — except for 2020, when the pandemic canceled it outright, the only gap in its 30-year run.

The thing to know before you go: every Glühwein comes in that year's own collectible souvenir mug, with a refundable $7 deposit built into the price — keep it as a Chicago Christmas keepsake or hand it back for your money. It's a tradition borrowed wholesale from Nürnberg, which banned disposable cups at its own market back in 1990. If you collect the mugs, there's a permanent gap on the shelf for 2020 — the one year nobody got one.