Haarlem, December
Haarlem in December, fifteen minutes from Amsterdam
A Christmas market in the streets around the Grote Markt, and a city that is easier to walk than Amsterdam in winter.
Haarlem is fifteen minutes from Amsterdam Centraal by train and gets a fraction of the visitors, which is the entire argument for going. It is the capital of the province of North Holland, it is older than Amsterdam, and in December it fills its streets with one of the larger Christmas markets in the country.
The market
The stalls run through the streets around the Grote Markt rather than being penned into one square, so the market is something you walk through on the way somewhere rather than queue to enter. It runs for a stretch of days in mid December, in the afternoon and into the evening, and the light at four o’clock in a Dutch December does more for it than any amount of decoration.
What is there the rest of the year
- The Grote Kerk, also called St Bavo, holds the Müller organ. Mozart played it in 1766, aged ten, and it is still played today. The church is the one in the background of a good many Golden Age paintings.
- Teylers Museum opened in 1784 and is the oldest museum in the Netherlands. It has never been modernised, which is the point: you are looking at an eighteenth century idea of what a museum should be, in its original cabinets.
- The Frans Hals Museum holds the largest collection of the painter who spent his career here, in the almshouse where some of his sitters ended up.
- Jopenkerk is a working brewery inside a former church, which sounds like a gimmick and is in fact just a good place to sit down with bitterballen after the walk.
Why it works as a winter day
The centre is compact and flat, the distances between the four things above are all under ten minutes on foot, and the whole thing is coverable in an afternoon. In summer Haarlem also functions as the back door to the coast, with Zandvoort beach twenty minutes further down the same railway line.
