This year everything is different. Of course that includes Christmas. We are on lockdown “lite” over here, meaning restaurants, bars & fun stuff are all closed. That includes my favorite event of the year, the Weihnachtsmarkt or Christmas markets. Germany is known for her beautiful Christmas markets. The booths, the lights, the smells! It makes a wonderful time of the year, magical.

Thanks to corona-Covid-pandemic they’ve put the kibosh on Christmas markets. They’ve killed the magic. I can’t really blame them. People love Christmas markets! Lots of people. Oodles of people. Germy people. Damn people. Ruining my fun.

But. The lights are up all over downtown Stuttgart. There are some random Christmas booths spread way apart. Way more than the six feet social distancing requires of people. More like six hundred feet. That may be a slight exaggeration, but not by much. It’s definitely not wall-to-wall booths this year.

There aren’t many nights we can all go downtown, Monday night was the best for the kids with their online classes. Still, Christian & Dane choose to stay home. It was -4°C. Pretty cold. Luckily I still had my Norway long underwear, it kept me from hating being out. It was still cold, just tolerably so.

Dave, Tess, Alana & I wandered around downtown admiring the lights. We looked in the booths we could find for our favorite treats and Christmas presents. Sadly, the booths were sad. The couple we found, didn’t have our favorites. A couple more were closed. Monday night, a cold Monday night, meant very few people. Good for Covid. Bad for looky-loo’s. Great for photographers.

There were almost no people blocking my shots of the lights. I’m still struggling with nighttime photography, but it’s a lot easier when I don’t have to maneuver around a bazillion people.