Christmas celebration in Sweden, a festival of lights

The countdown to Christmas is on and if there’s one thing we all love is Christmas markets. When deciding on a destination for a Christmas break away, there’s a lot of planning and factors to take into consideration.

Not only are the amazing Christmas markets an incentive to visit a certain place but the architecture and rich culture of a city are also something that should be taken into account when choosing where to travel.

Poland may not have the reputation for being a beautiful country but it is one of the cheapest and also has some of the best Christmas markets.

The Wroclaw Christmas market transforms the square into a fairytale and according to europeanbestdestinations.com is one of the most beautiful Christmas markets in Europe. The Markets start on November 20th and will be open until December 22nd. There is also various different Christmas concerts, parades, shows and meetings with Santa Claus.

There are also a ton of things to do whether it’s shopping, museum-hopping or getting stuck into

the vibrant nightlife and atmosphere.

Another European city that has Christmas markets worth visiting is Budapest.

Budapest hosts one of Europes largest Christmas markets and is held in Vörösmarty square, just minutes from the Danube. The market runs from November 23rd to January 1st and is the perfect place to pick up local hand crafted presents and sample delicious food including töki pompos which is a Hungarian style pizza.

The city also has so much to offer sight-seeing wise so if you choose to stay a little while longer you won’t be disappointed.

Hamburg has always been famous for its food markets but Germany’s second largest city also has a great Christmas market.

The main Weihnachtsmarkt is held in front of the Town Hall but there are also a range of other markets scattered throughout the city. The unconventional ‘Santa Pauli’ festival is the first erotic Christmas market in Europe and the adultsonly forest, offers colourful entertainment to the already lively Reeperbahn area.

If travelling abroad isn’t possible then Ireland also has some great Christmas markets worthy of a visit.

The Dun Laoghaire Christmas festival is one of the most popular in Dublin. This year the festival will feature all things retro with a Ferris wheel believed to have featured in Grease and an array of vintage rides to hop on and travel back in time. There is also a Christmas Market filled with handmade gifts and mouth-watering treats. The Dun Laoghaire Christmas Festival runs every weekend from November 30th to December 23rd on the Metals from 11am to 7pm.

Another Irish Christmas Market to put on your to do list is Galway Christmas Market which runs from November 15th until December 22nd. There are so many things to do in Galway regardless of the time of year and the Galway Christmas Markets add another layer to the already buzzing atmosphere.

As Ireland’s longest-running Christmas market, the Galway market spans from Eyre Square to Spanish Arch and boasts over 50 stalls with a selection of food, drink and gifts. The market also has Santa’s Grotto, live music performers, a range of rides and carol singing.

old posts for our own benefit F acebook was founded fifteen years ago which means many of us could be sitting on over a decade’s worth of personal data. Have you ever thought about mass deleting posts from your social medias?

If you’re in your early twenties, you’ve probably grown up with social media. We were just hitting teenage years when Facebook and Twitter were becoming popular. The memories of cringy teenage years are hard enough without having physical evidence of our green eyeshadow or our over gelled hair. Everyday Facebook shows us memories of pictures or status’ we posted on that day throughout the years. Because I can’t deal with the amount of second-hand embarrassment I get from 12-year-old me, I tend to delete everything as they come up.

Avoiding humiliation isn’t the only reason you should delete your old posts. I’m sure you’ve all been told that future employers could possibly look up your social media accounts.

The best advice here is to put your profile on private and have an appropriate profile picture. But if you don’t want to do that or in case they can see your profile anyway, could your potential employers not hire you because of the content on your various profiles?

Before you brush it off and say you’ve nothing offensive or politically incorrect on any of your pages, know that isn’t all people look for. According to The Muse, a website dedicated to helping people get jobs, people have been refused jobs because of aggressive arguing online, overly angry sports posts and posting about plans to party all summer.

Do you go out with your friends every weekend and have pictures of yourself with alcohol, or tweets about being hungover? One or two every now and then isn’t the worst thing, but if it’s every weekend it’s not going to give an employer the best impression.

We can’t mention the importance of deleting old posts without showing the extreme consequence of not deleting them. Laura Lee, a make-up artist and youtuber, lost 300,000 subscribers in one week in 2018 when racist tweets she posted in 2012 resurfaced. She also lost sponsorships and several brands severed ties with her.

Ten years of data is a lot of information to have on someone. Think about every Facebook page you’ve liked or everything you’ve retweeted. To Facebook you are a target, according to Jean – Charles Sorin, a lead developer of a tech company. He said, “social media filter bubbles and Facebook algorithms influence elections, products and ads to showed to you.”

On a less serious note, deleting your posts can be a cleansing experience. If you’re feeling too nostalgic to delete your old posts, ask yourself how often you look at them anyway. You can download all your pictures from Facebook and screenshot your embarrassing status’ before you delete them. Or if you’re doing an Instagram cleanse you can choose to archive your posts, which removes them from your profile but doesn’t delete them.

Some problems you might encounter is that you can only delete things you’ve posted and sometimes have to settle for just untagging yourself or hiding it from your profile. It is also incredibly time consuming as you must physically delete each post yourself. There are some services like TweetDeleter that mass deletes your tweets for you, however, sadly, Facebook has no equivalent.

If you have a spare hour or two, scroll through your posts, you never know what you might find.