Bury St Edmunds Christmas market
I have always found it hard to get into the Christmas spirit that early. This is mainly because my birthday is at the end of November and I feel that Christmas has started to over shadow it a bit! But today we decided to try and bring a bit of Christmas excitement to our weekend.
A local town called Bury St Edmunds had organised a Christmas market. It started on the 24th November and finished today. We decided that it would be fun to check it out. Fearing that the traffic and parking maybe tricky we decided to hop on a train. The trains between Ipswich and Bury St Edmunds leave about every half an hour. The actual journey takes between 20 and 40 minutes depending on the number of stations it stops at.
The highlight of the journey had to be realising that Garry's dad was in fact driving the train we were riding in. Garry's dad obviously is a train driver (he hadn't just hijacked a train). We have always wondered if we would end up on one of his trains. We were super excited when the ticket conductor confirmed it was. As the train pulled into the station we ran like big kids to the front of the train to wave to Garry's dad! Everyone else must have though we were mad.
Once at our destination it took around 10 minutes to walk from the station up into the central town. We quickly bumped into the festivities as Christmas tunes started to play in the streets.
The main Christmas market was close to the entrance of Abbey Gardens. Here there were rows of food and drink stalls - ranging from mulled wine, German sausages, cheese, chestnuts and Christmas puddings.
There were several gift stalls selling Christmas decorations and gifts. I particularly liked the blown glass Christmas tree decorations. They were £15 each however so decided to not invest due to the price.
We did however invest in a Christmas pudding for Christmas day. We got to taste the Christmas pudding at the stall - it was light - fruity and warm. We were sold on the spot and purchased one. The company selling them is known as LillyPuds.
It was really busy at the markets and getting through the crowds was a bit of a mission. We had fun though looking at the stalls, the Christmas decorations and the fair ground lights.
On the way back to the station we invested in some warm chips - fried in duck fat (super healthy) but were worth it for the taste.