An over the top Ljubljana Christmas, as always.

Like most European countries, we also celebrate Christmas in Slovenia, adorning our cities with lights to an excessive degree. I believe going completely overboard with city light decorations is a Slavic thing, as the Russians are even worse. However, despite being a bit much, it does bring out the festive feeling and Ljubljana looks quite pretty every year. Can you tell I’m not the biggest fan of Christmas kitsch?

Here are some impressions from the Christmas Ljubljana of 2018. Note that our decorations have been getting progressively more bizzare in the last couple of years, with equations, random messages, planets, floating sperm and weird shapes allover the place, which I find quite amusing.

Christmas Ljubljana 2018

In addition to the Christmas lights, there is always at least one large seasonal installation in the city centre. In 2018 it was an ice sculpture collection, named the Ice kingdom, for which my friend had an extra free ticket, so we went to see. The ice sculptures were quite impressive and apparently made with Stihl chainsaws, which always reminds me of their funny old commercial.

The Ice kingdom

Naturally, Ljubljana also has a Christmas market: the stalls are set up on the banks of our city river, Ljubljanica, and there are lots of concerts and smaller events happening during Christmas time. You can find pretty much everything there: local handcrafts, hearty local food to chase away the cold, sweets, mead, mulled wine and of course, beer.

Another thing which was quite a hit in 2018 Christmas Ljubljana was mulled gin, a new fad, which was amazingly delicious and might permanently replace mulled wine as my favourite winter drink.

P.S. Can you believe I managed a short post?

P.P.S.: Come check out the 2019 Christmas Ljubljana post too, it was actually snowing!