In winter, Carnival is celebrated with great enthusiasm. It is a time of elaborate street parades, masks, balls and official madness, and generally takes place seven weeks before Easter. Towns famous for their Carnival celebrations include Aachen, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Mainz, Munich and Münster.
In May, Hamburg in northern Germany holds its annual harbor festival Hafengeburtstag - a big birthday party that claims itself as the world's greatest port festival. This celebration has a long tradition in Hamburg and is very popular among citizens and visitors of Hamburg, particularly for its parade of cruise ships, frigates and steamboats.
Germany's warm summers come with more fun events. Nuremberg, located on the Romantic Road in Bavaria, is home to the Blue Night, which is a recurrent big art, culture and museum night event. Museums, churches and other cultural institutions open their doors until the early morning hours.
Worthwhile is the Carnival of Cultures in Berlin held each year at the end of May. This splendid four-day street festival celebrates Berlin's open-minded spirit in the city's most multicultural district of Kreuzberg. Carnival groups from more than 70 countries dance through the streets, and exotic food and drinks add to the international atmosphere. In Coburg, Franconia, the streets explode in a feast for the senses during Europe's biggest Samba Festival, which draws around 50 bands and as many as 200 dancers, not to mention hundreds of thousands of visitors each year in July. Throughout the summer months the spectacular "Rhine in Flames" events takes place. Visitors can enjoy impressive firework displays set against the dramatic backdrop of the Rhine in various towns along the river.
Fall is when Germany's most famous event and the world's largest beer festivals take place. Every year, the Theresienwiese fairground in Munich is transformed into a city of beer tents, amusements, rides and kiosks selling snacks and sweets for the world-famous Oktoberfest. Around the same time, Stuttgart hosts the second largest beer festival in Germany, the Cannstatter Wasen which also offers an abundance of entertainment.
Four weeks before Chrismas, thousands of Christmas Markets open their doors throughout Germany. Every year people from all over the world flock to the towns and cities to admire colorful stalls which sell mulled wine, arts and crafts, grilled sausages, gingerbread and much more. There are no entrance fees and you'll be able to enjoy free Christmas concerts and find very reasonable priced handmade items and traditional Christmas decorations to take home.
