How we check

MerryHoHo is a set of Christmas guides and free tools for 55 countries, each written in the country’s own language: who brings the presents and when, Christmas markets and light displays, local traditions and recipes, and printable tools for families. This page explains how the facts on those pages are checked, so you can judge how far to rely on them.

Dates and venues

For every market, light display or event we look first at the organiser’s own page, then at the city or the regional tourism office, and only after that at local press and event listings published this season. We search in the local language, because the useful page for a market in Poprad or Porto is rarely the English one. Where a source exists we link it on the page (“Organizer’s page”), and the page carries a dated “checked” line with the month of the last check, so you can see how fresh the information is.

Dates, prices and opening hours change at short notice. Please confirm with the organiser before you travel; that is what the link is for.

When 2026 has not been announced

Many small and municipal markets publish their programme only in November. When we cannot find a 2026 date from a source published this season, we say so: the card reads “2026 dates to be confirmed” and shows the previous edition’s dates labelled “Last season”, with the year. We do not assume that a market will repeat on the same days, and we do not fill a gap with something that merely sounds likely. Pages with gaps are checked again once organisers start announcing.

Tools that run in your browser

The free tools — letters, cards, certificates, printables, wish lists, Secret Santa — run in your browser, without a server doing the work. What you type is not sent to us. A Secret Santa draw lives in the link you share, after the # sign, which browsers never send to a server. Two small exceptions are described in full on the privacy page: the tools send an anonymous count of which tool was used (the event name and the page path, nothing you typed), and the video tool loads a ready-made sound clip for about fifty common names. The site sets no cookies and loads no third-party scripts.

Photos and illustrations

Photos by other people are used under free licences, mostly from Wikimedia Commons and Flickr; the author and licence are named under each photo with a link to the original. Illustrations made with the help of AI image tools are labelled as illustrations and do not show real people or real events. That label is already on many pages and is still being added to older ones, so if you find an unlabelled illustration, tell us.

What we do not do

• We have no advertising and no affiliate links, and nothing on the site is sponsored.
• No place, market or event pays to be listed or to be placed higher.
• Shop links on gift pages are plain store searches that earn us nothing.
• We do not copy text from other sites. Sources are read, then the page is written in our own words per country, not translated from one English master text.
• We leave out a fact we could not confirm instead of guessing.

Report a mistake

If a date, a price, an address or a local tradition is wrong, write to admin@merryhoho.com with the page address and, if you have it, a link to the correct source. We check it and correct the page. If you own a place or home shown here and want an address or photo removed, we do that within 48 hours.

Who is behind it

MerryHoHo is an independent site. It is not run by, or connected to, any market, shop, brand, postal service or public body mentioned on its pages. The legal page has the operator details and the editorial policy, and the about page explains why the site exists.