Our year came to a soft close as snow hampered our final events. First, Julefest, then our annual market in Des Moines. All in all, we ended the year better than expected, but it’s tempting to ask what could have been had the weather held out for either of these events.

For those who don’t know, Christkindlmarket Des Moines is an annual outdoor Christmas market stylized after German-themed festivals in Europe. We have been regular vendors there for 7 years now, and have seen the festival grow exponentially over the last couple of years. Our participation is kind of a last hurrah of the year for us and helps generate enough revenue to typically carry us to Spring when tourism traffic picks up again. The Rasmussen Group in Des Moines kindly sponsors some of the event costs for us as well.

This was the first year that Christkindlmarket went two weekends. Both the windmill and Kringleman Pastries participated in both weekends this year. The first weekend proved to be okay temperature-wise. It was cold, but not unbearable, but snow showers on Friday and Saturday blanketed all of our product which of course was outside our hygge hut. Thankfully, the snow was dry and brushed off easily, but it came down relentlessly both nights. It made everything look pretty except the register tape. We wish to thank Nicole Butler and Jon Adams for volunteering to help us out the first weekend. We hope they had enough fun to consider coming back with us next year.

Unfortunately, the second weekend was worse. We had more snow and severely cold temperatures. The festival remained open, with slightly shortened hours over the weekend, and we were surprised with just how many people came out anyway. It was enough business to recoup the costs of going, but it was still overall a disappointing year. The Museum of Danish America also briefly volunteered in the beer tent on Thursday night.

Afterwards, we loaded our 20' box truck back up with stuff and came back to Elk Horn. We want to thank Justin Nelson for helping us get much of the shelving and other supplies put out of the way.

We don’t plan on doing two weekends for this festival again. It’s too much work, and the risk for bad weather the second weekend is always high. Between working both weekends, Julie shipped out over 150 packages as this is also the final stretch for our mail orders as well. Whether or not the festival will continue to hold over two weekends remains to be decided, but we don’t have the capacity to make it work, as tempting as it is.

The rest of December moved rather quickly. We’ve enjoyed the pictures of the mill with the lights on that local residents have been sending us. We’ve also had some surprising traffic in the store. Once Christmas passed, we turned our focus onto inventory and expect to be done with that in early January.

We also wish to note that we did experience a sharp increase in scammer traffic and payment fraud to end the year both in our webstore and via electronic donations. It’s nothing we can’t handle, but is an incredible amount of unnecessary work.

On a more positive note, this was a good year for us and we hope to build on it in 2026, the windmill’s 50th year in Elk Horn. We hope you’ll join us at the Annual Meeting on January 26th so we can kick off our celebrations together.