A Bittersweet December - European Christmas Market 2025

One strong holiday season can change the way you plan an entire year.

I came across photos of a Nordic festival, located three hours south of my rural lake-town. The European Christmas Market, as I began to learn, is held in the Minnesota State capital, St. Paul. While winter weather trends cooler in Midwestern North America than traditional Christkindl cities like Vienna and Nuremberg, this market was growing despite the cold weather. After applying in 2024, we learned Wildflower Chocolate was accepted to join the market in the "South Village" community. 

Our first year had a few cold days, but the excitement of being in front of hundreds of thousands of holiday shoppers and seeing immediate and constant feedback to our gourmet chocolate bars was a new kind of energy, one that I imagine businesses attending the Minnesota State Fair are familiar with. Many of the Christmas Market vendors in St. Paul, and organizers, would chat about their State Fair experience, having happened only a few months prior.  Our team ended 2024 with a new appreciation for the volume of a bustling holiday market, and the power of a densely populated region like the Twin Cities. I went back to Nisswa and was able to close on a commercial land purchase in my own community, the Brainerd Lakes Area. The market sales secured a future step and plan for Wildflower Chocolate to be able to one day own a stand-alone cafe style commercial building. Chocolate, coffee and connection with a summer forest peacefulness and winter wood-burning hygge -- I'm still working towards that. 

Our year in 2025 began with a game-changing success just behind us from that first 2024 December market. We immediately began reviewing our menu, COGS, highest margin and most popular items. A new confidence carried into 2025. A "We have the Christmas market to fall back on" mindset that piled responsibilities into the end of the year. What followed through the year were rising cacao prices and tariff surcharges, an exciting addition of our coffee brand, Iver's Roastery, and the entirety of a full-term pregnancy for one of our chocolatiers. Her summer and trimester were spent preparing jams and chocolate bars before watching Q4 unfold, infant in arms.

Our 2025 Christmas Market season was just the financial blow I needed to ground into the reality of what types of swings are possible at an outdoor market, where shopping and traffic is so tightly linked first to weather, second to logistics like organization and marketing. We spend days in below zero and single digit temps (Fahrenheit). The hot food vendors with higher costs and equipment felt it most, some to the tune of a six-figure loss of sales from 2024. On the last day of a grueling twelve-day market, I was able to sneak out and capture a bit of sunshine in our beloved South Village. We ended on a happy energetic day, with some normalcy of what we were all expecting our December at Union Depot to feel like. This 2025 December was bittersweet. Captured here are photos of the "sweet" last day. Prior to that it was too cold to take my camera out... -Kate

The European Christmas Market is held at Union Depot in St. Paul Minnesota, United States.