Christmas market at Cologne Cathedral

This guide to the Christmas market at Cologne Cathedral opens in the wreckage of nineteen forty-two, when a night of Allied bombing left most of the old city in ruins, and traces how the cathedral's twin spires kept standing through more than two hundred sixty air raids. It follows the years-long effort to patch and rebuild the structure after the war, then shifts to the market itself: mulled wine, carols, rows of wooden stalls and a towering illuminated tree filling the square below those spires. Keep the glühwein mug you're handed here, it doubles as a souvenir of the same ground that once stood in smoke.