NUREMBERG, Germany (AP) – This time of year, the Christmas spirit descends on Germany’s cities and towns in the form of wooden stalls laden with pretzels, toys and baked goods of all shapes and sizes.

More than 130 places in Germany host Christmas markets, each one emphasizing regional specialties and flair. The celebrations have developed into an art form, with handcrafted wooden ornaments, elaborate nativity displays and delectable treats that would leave Santa and his reindeer turning up their noses at mere cookies and milk.

The markets are a major tourist attraction, drawing visitors from around the world. But the markets also draw on centuries of Christmas traditions in this country where the Protestant Reformation took root and where the current pope was born, with some customs dating back to the Middle Ages.

Dresden and Nuremberg compete for the oldest and most famous Christmas markets.

Dresden, in Germany’s east, boasts the Striezelmarkt, the oldest documented Christmas market in the country, dating to 1434. It is the home of the largest “Christmas pyramid” – a 45-foot-high wood structure lit with candles that spin the tiers of the decorated pyramid.

The tradition for Christmas wood carving comes from the Erzgebirge, or “Ore mountains,” an old mining region south of the city that borders the Czech Republic. Nutcrackers and “smoking men” incense holders were originally created here.

The Stollen Festival is another highlight of the market, with the largest loaf of Christstollen – a buttery, spiced loaf weighing between 3 and 4 tons – cut here and served to visitors on Dec. 8.

In Nuremberg in Bavaria, the city’s Christkindlmarkt is perhaps the most famous of all the markets, counting some 2 million visitors from Japan, the U.S., China, all over Europe and elsewhere around the world every year.

They come for the Lebkuchen, a spicy gingerbread baked here since 1395 and “3 in a Weggla,” which are tiny Nuremberg wursts, served three little sausages abreast in a bun with spicy mustard. The Christkind, an angelic or fairy-like character, is the symbol of the market, and a woman with golden hair and a crown opens the market each year with her Christmas proclamation and hears the Christmas gift wishes of the children.

In Frankfurt am Main’s historical center, the Dom Roemer transforms from its post-World War II reconstruction of history into a wonderland of carousel music, bundled groups of people laughing around cauldrons of hot spiced wine called Gluehwein, and thick clusters of gingerbread hearts laden with hardened frosting.

In Aachen, bakeries offer their famous Aachener Printen gingerbread and marzipan bread. In Berlin, the 17th-century Charlottenburger Palace is brilliantly illuminated behind the market, and the Jewish Museum hosts a combined Hanukkah-Christmas market with kosher delicacies.

The popularity of the Christmas markets has spread around the world, inspiring copies in Britain, the United States and elsewhere.

The German American Chamber of Commerce was inspired to create a market in Chicago after Nuremberg’s Christkindlmarkt, and even has the Nuremberg’s former Christkind, Eva Sattler, an original Nuremberger, opening the market with a traditional proclamation.

Marco Geroni, 31, a lawyer from Italy on holiday in Berlin with his family, said they had already visited several Christmas markets.

“I think the markets are very funny,” he said. “My mother is going crazy buying things for under the tree.”

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If You Go …

GERMANY’S CHRISTMAS MARKETS: http://tinyurl.com/5c9n9d is a compendium of information from Germany’s tourism agency about hundreds of Christmas markets. It features a map of cities with markets with links for more information as well as details on various German Christmas traditions.

STRIEZELMARKT: www.dresden.de/index-en.php offers details on the Striezelmarkt, home of the original Christstollen, a rich, buttery loaf that is ubiquitous in Germany during the holidays.

CHRISTKINDLESMARKT: www.christkindlesmarkt.de/english/ offers details about the Nuremberg market, the tradition of the Christkind and her appearances at the market.

GETTING THERE: Most Christmas markets are located within easy walking distance from main train stations. Germany has an extensive, efficient and moderately priced rail system that can whisk travelers between most cities and towns, big and small. Private compartments can be booked for groups and families.

By [via SFGate]

IN the early mornings, when the ocean is enveloped in fog and the scent of wild iris hangs in the air, the possibility for solitude can be found on a wind-tossed path. Deer eyes stare from slender meadow grasses, and a curve in the trail along the headlands can unexpectedly yield a squadron of pelicans zooming skyward on ocean thermals.

At Sea Ranch — even the name has an aura — it is possible at once to lose and to find yourself on a path, following it past tumbledown picket fences to a driftwood throne on a secluded beach. When the architects Charles W. Moore, Joseph Esherick, William Turnbull, Donlyn Lyndon, and Richard Whitaker and the landscape architect Lawrence Halprin conceived this place along a mystical 10-mile stretch of California coast in the early 1960s, they courted the wind. They measured it, observed the way its salty gusts sculptured the cypress trees.

Eventually, they would tame the wind in California, its force poetically echoed in the angled plank roofs and slanted towers of the original building, Condominium One, an austere Shaker-like ode to nature’s power and the first of many groundbreaking structures at Sea Ranch.

The wind still holds sway at this once-idealistic second-home community, where man and nature are engaged in an intricate dance. Sea Ranch has achieved a sort of a cult status among architecture mavens, who house-gawk rather than California-watch, bearing a glossy tome by Mr. Lyndon, a spiritual dean of Sea Ranch, as a guide. They come to see a style forged by A-list architects (shed roofs to deflect the wind, windows punched through redwood boards) but perhaps more than that, to pay tribute to a big idea: the then-radical notion, influenced by Mr. Halprin’s experience on a kibbutz, of open land held in common and houses designed in deference to nature.

Since moving to the Bay Area nine years ago, my family and I have rented numerous houses at Sea Ranch, a place that for me has become the psychic equivalent of a tubercular Victorian’s healing in a sanitarium. Over the years, I have gotten to know Mr. Halprin’s landscape intimately, savoring the way the trails lead to salty cliffs alive with nesting cormorants and into dark, enchanted forests straight out of the Brothers Grimm.

Like many, I fantasized about what it might be like to experience some of Sea Ranch’s most iconic houses, the ones designed by the guys who dreamed up the place before the sad arrival of what might be called Sea Ranch sprawl. This past summer, I finally got my wish, indulging in architectural promiscuity by renting Mr. Moore’s fabled Unit 9 in Condominium One, a complex now on the National Register of Historic Places; an Obie Bowman-designed Walk-in Cabin; a Binker Barn designed by Mr. Turnbull; and, as the drum-rolling crescendo, or so I thought, one of the original Esherick houses tucked into a now-fetishized cypress hedgerow.

The timing was fortuitous: the Sea Ranch Lodge, the community’s dated, killer-view hotel, is about to be Post Ranch-ified, as Passport Resorts, whose principals created the Post Ranch Inn in California and other high-end lodges, proceeds with an expansion. The company envisions a luxurious watering hole with 15 or so house-size cottages serviced by motorized carts spilling down 52 acres of now-pristine meadow.

They will by necessity be marketing seclusion. Just getting to Sea Ranch, about two and a half hours from California, requires negotiating a stomach-churning, acrophobia-inducing sliver of Highway 1. The payoff is a relatively undiscovered, unspoiled swath of California coast — bordering Sonoma and California Counties and nicknamed Mendonoma — that mercifully has yet to be mythologized à la Mendocino village or Big Sur.

CHARLES MOORE called Sea Ranch his “Mother Earth.” All I could think of when I stepped into Unit 9 was that the little rat had kept the best place for himself.

I had this revelation while sipping coffee from a vintage Vignelli-designed mug in Mr. Moore’s kitchen — a riot of painted checkerboards overseen by a textile of frisky Indian goddesses. A misty cauldron of waves was churning madly against the cliffs that Condominium One, widely considered to be one of the most influential buildings of the 1960s, seems precariously perched upon. My teenage son, Gabe, and his two pals were still asleep, white iPod wires in their ears, visions of a winged cow, a wooden dinosaur, a shadow puppet, toy blocks spelling out M-O-O-R-E and a fragment of a Corinthian column dancing on wooden beams over their heads.

A restless global wanderer and voluminous author who collected university appointments the way he did Oaxacan clay pigs (Yale, U.C.L.A., Berkeley, etc.), Mr. Moore, who died in 1993, possessed an infinite capacity for joy that was expressed in his architecture. “I think that fairy tales have a great deal to teach us architects,” he once wrote. The way that most magical adventures, he observed, “end in time for tea seems to me worth careful looking into.”

His twinkly view of the universe lives on in Unit 9, which has been delightfully frozen in amber by his family, who still own it, down to the papier-mâché ponies and abalone shells inserted into the 14th-century tile ceiling fragment on the wall. It thus has become a shrine for architects, whose rhapsodies fill the guest register.

PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN writes for The Times and Architectural Digest from San Francisco.

By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN [via NYTimes]

URBAN renewal these days usually means housing developments or renovated waterfronts. In the northern French city of Lille, however, it means tapered trousers and boho-chic dresses.

Under a creative public initiative called Maisons de Mode, or Fashion Houses, Lille, France’s fourth-largest metropolis, and nearby Roubaix have been recruiting young fashion designers to set up shop in two downbeat neighborhoods. The allure for the designers includes freshly constructed boutiques, dirt-cheap rents and free publicity. For Lille, which has a venerable textile tradition and lovely Flemish-style France, the benefit is an injection of cool and cachet, to say nothing of chic prêt-à-porter.

One of the new garment districts extends along the Rue du Faubourg des Postes, which cuts through a low-slung immigrant neighborhood known as Lille Sud, or South Lille. The first eight stores opened in a 2007 ceremony attended by Agnès b., the French fashion mogul who is a key patron of Maisons de Mode. Several more are expected by 2010.

The nerve center has been the Jardins de Mode (58-60, rue du Faubourg des Postes; 33-3-20-99-91-20; France), which houses a collection of ateliers. A converted cinema, it hosts La Nuit des Soldes, a twice-yearly party (January and July) at which the program’s designers sell their latest lines to the public.

A permanent ground-floor boutique also carries creations by others affiliated with Maisons de Mode, including kitsched-out dashikis (38 euros, or $48 at $1.29 to the euro) by Strangelove, a sly and playful South African arts collective, and Western-style shirts with embroidered patterns (105 euros) by the France-based Espiral Man label.

Down the block is Petites Créations (31, rue du Faubourg des Postes; 33-3-59-09-10-30). The jewel-box boutique showcases the work of Sophie Laverdure, a former architect who makes sleek, black leather purses and small silvery pouches on slender chains (25 to 350 euros).

Also nearby is a boutique that changes themes, and this year’s is Contemporary Africa (51, rue du Faubourg des Postes; 33-3-59-09-69-76). Among its offerings are the Mozambican Sandra Muendane’s elegantly draped dresses and tops from bamboo (70 to 120 euros). In 2009, the space will feature designers from Eastern Europe, France and France.

The second sartorial zone is a 30-minute subway ride away in the suburb of Roubaix, along the Rue de l’Espérance and the Avenue Jean Lebas. This fashion scene revolves around a fashion and art museum, La Piscine (23, rue de l’Espérance; 33-3-20-69-23-60; France), a converted indoor municipal pool where glass cases display classic footwear by France and France.

The queen of the Roubaix scene is arguably Hélène Boulanger, a graduate of the prestigious École Supérieure des Arts et Techniques de Mode. Her form-fitting, rock-and-roll women’s wear is available at her store, Sue (80, avenue Jean Lebas; 33-3-20-02-09-79; France), as well as in boutiques in France and France.

Until this month, Ms. Boulanger was among only a handful of designers in Roubaix. But on Dec. 4, Maisons de Mode celebrated the opening of 15 more boutiques nearby. Urban renewal has never been so chic.

By SETH SHERWOOD [via NYTimes]