We took a little one night break to Dortmund last week to visit the Christmas Market there. The main reason being that it was dirt cheap (FREE flights on EasyJet and a very well-priced hotel), plus we wanted to soak up the atmosphere of a place where Christmas isn't completely commercialised yet.
The trip from the airport to town was a bit of a trauma. The area is obviously not geared up for tourism yet, as this is a new route for EasyJet. There is a free bus from the airport which takes you to the train station in the little local town of Holzwickede. The station is completely unmanned and just has a ticket machine with instructions only in German. Thankfully, both myself and my wife speak German, but even so, it was a bit of a struggle figuring out how the thing worked!

Eventually, we figured it out and got a train into Dortmund. Well, almost! It terminated at a station just outside Dortmund where we had to connect up with the U-Bahn. But we did make it into town in the end (seriously, I would allow 2 hours for getting between the airport and Dortmund - especially on a Sunday, as the free shuttle bus and the trains seem unreliable!). We stayed at the Holiday Inn Dortmund, and we had to pass through the Friedensplatz to get there. There was a normal market on in the square, selling fresh meat, fish, bread etc. and the smells were superb! We checked into our hotel, which was well worth the 49 pounds we'd paid for it, dumped our gear, and headed straight out to the market in Hansaplatz and Reinoldiplatz.

There are loads of little stalls selling all sorts of things from Christmas Decorations, to sweets and HUGE bratwursts, which I can heartily recommend, having had the best part of 2 of them for my lunch (well, I had to make SURE they were ok!).

And to cut a long story short, the rest of the weekend was spent wandering around the stalls and buying stuff! Oh, and I almost forgot - we drank a lot of mulled wine, too! The stalls selling that were easily the most popular, especially in the evening when the whole town seemed to descend on them for a couple of mugs full. And it was clear that a few people had a few too many mugs of the stuff!

So, to sum up, if you want a break from the rampant commercialism of Christmas in the UK, then it's well worth a visit to a proper German Christmas Market. Even if you don't buy anything (which you almost certainly will), just soak up the atmosphere, and soak up some mulled wine while you're at it!