Story by TRENT MOORE Photos by AMANDA SHAVERS
A Schwibbogen— a traditional German Christmas candle arch standing 24 feet 4 inches tall and 47 feet 5 inches wide— leads the way into the 2025 Cullman Christkindlmarkt.
For a festival that has quickly grown to attract almost half a million visitors to Cullman each winter, Christkindlmarkt has the kind of humble beginning that would fit perfectly in its own magical, smalltown Christmas fable.
The now-massive holiday event that takes over Depot Park and the Warehouse District in downtown Cullman for much of November and December dates back to essentially a one-day pilot test in 2019, and slowly grew over the next couple of years into a tentpole festival in a town already well-known for large-scale events like Cullman Oktoberfest and the Alabama Strawberry Festival. But it was 2023 when festival organizers truly saw the potential to make this a destination event.
“ That ' s when we went all in on building a much larger, full-scale, authentic German Christmas market that connected back to Cullman ' s
German heritage,” Nathan Anderson, director Cullman Parks Recreation & Sports Tourism, explained.
“ In 2025 we had over 415,000 visitors, from all 50 states, and nearly 80 percent of our attendance came from outside Cullman County. Somewhere along the way, Christkindlmarkt stopped being just another local Christmas event and became a Christmas destination.”
Just a few years after going all-in on Christmas, Cullman’ s Christkindlmarkt festival has added market days, vendors, food, attractions and square footage to its footprint with each passing year. For a festival less than a decade old, Christkindlmarkt has grown to be the largest festival of its kind in the United States by size— and second-largest in the nation by attendance, right behind Chicago’ s Christkindlmarkt, which has been an annual event for three decades.
Anderson said they could see the potential after the early success with the smaller-scale version of a Christmas festival.
Work then went into studying other German Christmas markets to see how they could adapt those concepts into something true to Cullman’ s heritage. Rolling the dice for the 2023 event meant going bigger and gauging the response from the public, with the parks department investing in wooden market huts, major visual anchors, entertainment, lighting and attractions, and expanded food to truly make Christkindlmarkt a destination event.
“ There was an intentional strategy from the beginning,” Anderson said.“ What we couldn ' t have predicted was how fast people would respond. The vision came first, but the public response permitted us to dream even bigger.”
28 Cullman magazine | HOLIDAY 2026