We will have missed the Onion Market when we get to Weimar next week. Now in its 360th year, the ultra German Onion Festival (Zweibelmarkt) will be a memory. A scent in the air, you might say.

Yup, onions. You should see the weeks of preparation required for three unabashed days of festivity, all revolving around my favorite food: the onion. Let’s put it this way: there are not too many places you can wear an onion necklace and fit in. But at Onion Market, it’s de riguer.

After three weeks of hibernation and work in Weimar, we will leave in late November for Cittavecchia, Italy, and a transatlantic crossing where I’ll be speaking on the beautiful Celebrity Constellation. As lovely as that will be, we’re sorry to be departing only days before Weimar’s beloved Christmas Market begins. This must be our year to miss festivals.

In 2011, Weimar was shocked to see itself named the Number One Christmas Market in a CNN survey. It’s a delightful Christmas Market, but to be called “Number One” world-wide, eclipsing the better known market in Dresden, for example, and others across the globe, flabbergasted people.

Locals began wondering if an influx of new tourists would overwhelm the event, but it hasn’t. Germans love their Christmas markets, but they don’t bring the kind of frantic consumerism to them that we see here in America, especially on the (to me) most objectionable “festival” of so-called Black Friday, the artificially crowned day of insane shopping and wreckless behavior that some people apparently find great fun.

I’ll save my memories of the way the Friday after Thanksgiving was commemorated back in “ancient times” when we grew up for another post. And I’ll spare you more about onion necklaces, onion centerpieces, onion soups and onion breads. You kinda have to experience onion-madness to make sense of it.