‘If you’re thinking of going to York Christmas market on a Saturday,” says an exasperated local on TikTok, “can you just not?” I thought instantly of my friend E, a peaceable, gentle woman – a therapist! – who is driven to seething rage by the appearance of the first chalets. Everyone I know here is feeling the same Scroogery, muttering in stark horror: “carnage”, “crazy”, “never”.
Those of us who live in York are not easily spooked; we’re used to dodging the flailing swords and booming faux-Norse utterances of historical re-enactors, fighty racegoers and crying, shoeless hens, shedding whisps of pink boa. But the market, with its shuffling hordes stuck in a bottleneck outside Claire’s because someone decided to try on a Viking helmet, 40-deep queues for a plastic beaker of mulled wine and man asking for £2 for a selfie with his plastic dinosaur, has broken us.
Keep away, you may say, but what if we want to go to the bank? (Silly, yes, no one wants to go to the bank, it’s just a person in a lanyard consulting exactly the same website as you and coming to the same baffled, impotent conclusions.) Prepare to be assaulted by synthetic cinnamon, Wham! and wet anoraks. It was massively overcrowded last year, but so far 2023 seems even busier.
It’s not just York: the UK has gone Christmas market bananas. Lincoln, one of the “oldest” (1982), has been cancelled after crowd numbers reached 320,000 over four days last year – far over its ideal 250,000 limit. People commenting on the York TikTok video write that Manchester is “deadlock”, Edinburgh “a nightmare”, and other cheery festive words.
I know I shouldn’t begrudge anyone a living or a moment of joy, but we’re not Cologne or Strasbourg, with crisp, frosty weather, gingerbread delights and charming tree ornaments carved by fifth-generation artisans. We’ve just flung up some half-hearted chalets in the rain and hoped for the best. Can’t we revive our own time-honoured festive shopping tradition: panicking over scarves in a department store hotter than the core of the Earth, then giving up and going to the pub?
• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
