Strasbourg Christmas Market
in pixels

About Strasbourg Christmas Market

Strasbourg calls itself the “Capitale de Noël”, and its Christmas market is the oldest in France. Its story starts in 1570, during the Reformation, when the city replaced the Klausenmärik, a market held around St Nicholas’ Day by the cathedral, with a market named after the Christkindel, the Christ Child. In Alsatian it is still the Christkindelsmärik. In the 1870s it settled on Place Broglie, where its oldest section still stands, and since 1992 the whole old town has been dressed for the season under the Capitale de Noël name.

Today the market is spread over several squares of the Grande Île, the island of the old town that is a UNESCO World Heritage Site: the Christkindelsmärik on Place Broglie, the stalls around the cathedral, Place Kléber with its giant tree, the Petite France quarter, a fair-trade “Marché Off” on Place Grimmeissen and others, around 300 chalets in all. They sell Alsatian bredele biscuits, gingerbread, decorations and vin chaud, the local mulled wine, and the market drew about three million visitors in 2025.

The centrepiece is the Grand Sapin on Place Kléber, the city’s main square, which has been the symbol of the season since 2000. It is usually about 30 metres tall; the 2026 tree is a silver fir of about 90 years from the Walscheid national forest in Moselle, decorated with wooden clouds, stars, moons, red stockings and hearts, with a little village of lit facades at its foot. Around it stands the Village du Partage, chalets run by local charities. The square is closed on its north side by the Aubette, a long neoclassical building designed by Jacques-François Blondel and built from 1765.

A few hundred metres east, the stalls fill Place de la Cathédrale in front of Notre-Dame de Strasbourg, built of pink Vosges sandstone. Its single spire, finished in 1439, rises 142 metres on the north tower (the south tower was never built), and from 1647 to 1874 it was the tallest building in the world. On the north side of the square stands the Maison Kammerzell, a house begun in 1427 whose richly carved timber upper floors date from 1589. In between, the streets of the old town are hung with lights and with the giant baubles, garlands and teddy bears that shops put up over their fronts every year.

The diorama

The diorama joins Strasbourg’s two best-known Christmas squares on one snowy floating island, built in Three.js and rendered as pixel art: the scene is drawn at a low resolution, every edge gets a dark outline, the colours are reduced to a small palette, and the result is scaled up without smoothing. In the west lies Place Kléber, with the Grand Sapin in its south-west corner, hung with gold, silver and red baubles and spirals of white lights inside a lit fence, the chalets of the Village du Partage around it, the statue of General Kléber in the middle and the long Aubette along the north side, its facade strung with lights.

A lane of half-timbered houses leads east, their shop fronts dressed with giant baubles, garlands, stars and teddy bears under a canopy of lights strung across the street. It opens onto Place de la Cathédrale, where wooden chalets with snowy, decorated roofs sell vin chaud and gifts, the Maison Kammerzell stands on the north-west corner with its rows of small windows and tiers of dormers, and the pink sandstone west front of the cathedral closes the square, with its rose window, three portals and the single spire on the north tower. At night the chalets glow, the tree twinkles, steam rises from the vin chaud pots and floodlights turn the cathedral front gold.

Things to spot

• Steam rising from the vin chaud pots, with people standing round holding red mugs
• A giant teddy bear over a shop front in the lane
• The statue of General Kléber with snow on his shoulders
• The lit fence around the foot of the Grand Sapin
• A small decorated fir on the cathedral square
• Birds circling high over the cathedral spire

What we simplified

• Place Kléber and the cathedral are about 450 metres apart, through several streets; here they are joined by a single 16-metre lane.
• The cathedral is drawn at about 0.4 times its real size, and it stops at the edge of the island just behind its west front. The Grand Sapin is shortened to about 24 metres.
• The diorama shows only two of the market’s squares, with 18 chalets in all instead of around 300; the historic Christkindelsmärik on Place Broglie and the other sites are not in the scene.
• The half-timbered houses are generic Strasbourg houses, not the actual buildings on the way from Place Kléber to the cathedral, and the snow is added for the winter look.