German Christmas traditions for kids: St. Nicholas to markets

German Christmas for kids runs on a few traditions that are easy to share at home: a 24-door Advent calendar, shoes polished and set out on the night before St. Nicholas Day on December 6, a trip to a Christmas market, a Stollen on the table, and presents opened on Christmas Eve. Below is each tradition in a sentence or two you can say to a small child, with an activity or coloring page for each, all sourced to German government and community organizations.

If you have German grandparents or great-grandparents, ask them first. Customs differ a lot between regions and families, and their version is the one your kids will remember.

Advent: counting down with a calendar and a wreath

Advent is the season of waiting before Christmas. According to deutschland.de, the German government's information site, the idea of the Advent calendar came about in Germany in the early 20th century, with 24 doors hiding colorful Christian pictures. Chocolate was added later.

Make one at home. Draw 24 numbered windows on a sheet of paper and a simple picture behind each one on a second sheet: a star, a candle, a boot, a gingerbread heart. Staple the sheets together and cut three sides of each window so it opens. A coloring Advent calendar, where your child colors one small picture each morning, takes almost no prep and costs nothing.

The same site notes that from the first Sunday of Advent, Christmas markets, Christmas songs on the radio and fairy lights appear across the country. The St. Nicholas Center describes families in Germany lighting candles on the Advent wreath as they wait for St. Nicholas. A wreath with four candles is a good coloring page: color in one flame per Sunday.

St. Nicholas Day: boots by the door

This is the tradition kids love most. The St. Nicholas Center's page on Germany describes how children clean and polish their shoes or boots before the saint's visit, and on the evening before St. Nicholas Day put letters and carrots or other food for his white horse or donkey on a plate or in their shoes. If they have been good, he fills the shoes overnight with fruits, nuts and candies. In some homes Sankt Nikolaus visits in person with his big book and asks the children whether they have behaved, and his companion Ruprecht comes along too.

St. Nicholas Day is December 6, and the St. Nicholas Center notes that in the United States it is celebrated by communities with a German heritage, among others, with the German Sankt Nikolaus appearing in New Ulm, Minnesota, and Pittsburgh, and the tradition also found in Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Cleveland and St. Louis.

To do with kids:

• Polish shoes together on December 5. A toddler with a soft cloth and a boot is fully occupied for ten minutes.
• Draw a picture or write a short letter for St. Nicholas to leave in the shoe.
• Leave a carrot for the horse. Little kids find that part very convincing.
• Coloring page: a pair of boots by a door, overflowing with oranges, nuts and a candy cane.

Christmas markets, nutcrackers and Christmas pyramids

German Christmas markets fill town squares with wooden stalls. The best known, deutschland.de says, is Nuremberg's Christkindlesmarkt, with about 180 wooden stalls with red-and-white striped roofs, where visitors may meet the Christkind, played by a girl from Nuremberg who is elected for two years. Dresden's Striezelmarkt dates back to 1434, and Munich's market includes a whole market for carved Nativity figures.

If there is a German-style Christmas market near you, it is worth a cold evening. If not, the market makes a great coloring page: a row of little wooden huts with striped roofs, a big tree, lights strung between them, and your family walking through with cups of cocoa.

Three wooden decorations from the Erzgebirge (Ore Mountains) in Saxony are worth knowing, and each makes a fun page:

• Nutcrackers. deutschland.de says the first Erzgebirge nutcrackers were made around 1870, when local people carved kings, soldiers and generals and put them to work cracking hard nuts, which is why the nutcracker always frowns. Kids enjoy hearing that.
• Christmas pyramids. Heat rising from candles turns a fan wheel on top, and carved figures go round underneath, often telling a whole story.
• Incense smokers. Round little wooden figures with smoke rising from their mouths, first made around 1830.

Christmas foods and Christmas Eve

Gingerbread and Spekulatius cookies appear early, deutschland.de notes, and Stollen is the classic Christmas cake. Its shape, dusted with icing sugar, symbolizes the Child Jesus wrapped in swaddling clothes, and the site says it was first mentioned in a document in Naumburg in 1329. A Stollen is hard for a small child to help make, but cutting gingerbread hearts is easy.

The big day is Christmas Eve. The deutschland.de guide to how Christmas is celebrated in Germany says that on Christmas Eve, December 24, it is time to decorate the tree, wrap presents and prepare the meal before families get together in the early evening, and that they open the presents under the tree after the meal. Germany then has two Christmas holidays, on December 25 and 26. Children write their wish lists weeks ahead, and deutschland.de describes Christmas post offices that answer them: letters addressed to the Christkind in Engelskirchen arrive from around 60 nations.

Activity: have your child draw their wish list instead of writing it. A page of pictures with a stamp drawn in the corner is a keepsake in a few years.

German Christmas picture books

• The Legend of Saint Nicholas by Demi: the life of the saint and how he came to be associated with Christmas and Santa Claus. Good before December 6.
• The Nutcracker by Susan Jeffers: an abridged picture-book telling of Marie and her toy nutcracker, listed for ages 3 to 8. Pair it with a nutcracker coloring page.

Make a page about your own family's Christmas

The pages kids keep are the ones with their own people on them: Oma rolling out cookie dough, everyone's boots lined up on December 5, the family at the market. Draw them yourself, or trace a photo using our guide to turning a photo into a coloring page for free. Colorkin can also draw a page of your family from a photo, drafted with AI illustration tools and checked by a person. We are making a German American Christmas market coloring storybook too. It is not on sale yet.

For a whole Christmas coloring book starring your family, see our guide to Christmas coloring pages of your own family, and for a gift the grandparents will keep, our Christmas gifts for grandparents from grandkids. More holidays and heritage are in our family and heritage hub.

Questions parents ask