The Strasbourg Christmas market was inaugurated this Wednesday. This year again, millions of visitors are expected. He runs until December 27. The chalets are open from 11:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. every day except December 24-25 from 11:30 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Sound No. 1 – What awaits you for the 2024 edition on the theme of books?
Guillaume Libsig – Deputy mayor of Strasbourg in charge of organizing the Christmas market
Let’s first talk about the theme “Time to marvel”, why did you want to highlight books and stories?
So, firstly, because this year we are the UNESCO world book capital, and therefore it is a subject that we are covering for a year in all possible categories, and secondly, because we have also been working for some time on rethink the place of the child in “capital of Christmas”, and we try to put that back at the heart of our attention.
We have a site that is completely dedicated to children, it is the Louise Weiss square where there are a lot of activities, a lot of entertainment. We can cite the reading of stories or concerts. On the book, we have a chalet which is allocated to independent publishers in the region who take turns to show their productions, and we have the decoration of the tree which is completely themed around the book.
You wanted to make this Christmas market a market committed to the planet, what does that mean?
We are, at the same time, very vigilant about sustainable development and eco-responsibility and then we want to be exemplary. If we come up with an event that brings together 300 exhibitors and brings in 3 million people, I think anyone can do it. So, we have all the chalets which are LED, there has been work on the heaters, work which has been done on the treatment of waste since we have 6 categories of waste sorting this year, and also work that we experimented with this year on what we call gray water, oils, and in fact we now capture these fluids, we no longer send them into the sewers and we will treat them elsewhere.
300 chalets are spread across the different squares. The Strasbourg Christmas market is sometimes criticized for offering products that lack authenticity, are you vigilant about the quality of the products offered by exhibitors?
It’s a debate that is actually several decades old, we chose to approach it in a fairly direct way and we had the debate with the exhibitors and it resulted in a method of rating chalets, they have a score out of 100, on criteria which have been thought out with them and with the representatives who are the CCI, the CMA and all the partners so that we can be in a logic of continuous improvement, and that the exhibitors know little where they are with, at the same time, the demands of the organizer, the city of Strasbourg, but also the demands of the public and of a body that we created which is called the citizens’ jury because we wanted residents to be able to have a say in the Christmas market, which was not the case before.
This rating system was completed last year. We did a test session, observation, white patent, in December 2023, and it is really in December 2024 this year that we activate the first analyzes and we will have the first notes compiled at the beginning of 2025.
The 2018 attack is still on people’s minds, what is being put in place in terms of security?
I often say that our first partner is the prefecture, because it is with them that we define the overall framework in which the event takes place. We moved from a logic of what we called bunkerization which had posed a lot of problems, a lot of rejections of the event to a logic of security that was much more fluid and much more reactive. We are working on this notion of faster response, this notion of permanence with circulation. There are more than 1000 agents circulating in the Christmas capital with a whole bunch of equipment but above all very good coordination between the State and the city of Strasbourg on this subject.
In terms of entertainment, are there any highlights not to be missed?
I would like to, but faced with large crowds and security issues, we try not to have a big single meeting where everyone comes to the same place at the same time. What we do is that we have lots of little suggestions all the time: the tree lights up every hour, the activities for the children are permanent or regular. Solidarity actors can offer small meetings. We have 80 associations which take turns in the chalets at the foot of the tree. They invite people to come and see what they do, they offer small shows, and there, it’s really money that will directly support the most precarious people behind.
