Popular Dresden Summer Night Market cancelled
![Enormous crowds jammed into downtown Dresden for the community’s annual Summer Night Market in 2019. It’s for that very reason that organizers have cancelled the 2020 edition – which was to be held in August – because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Peter Epp/Chatham This Week](https://nexus.prod.postmedia.digital/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/0521-CA-NightMarket-scaled.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=288&h=216&sig=yl4YkLjnm7oe4WEpREIdww)
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After attracting thousands of people in its first few years of operation, the 2020 Downtown Dresden Summer Night Market is one of the latest events to be nixed because of the pandemic.
Dresden has held a summer and Christmas night market since each year since the winter of 2017. The events have packed the downtown area with vendors and visitors. But for that very reason, the August event has been cancelled.
“We don’t want to put anyone at risk of contracting COVID-19 because we do draw a sizeable crowd,” said Morena McDonald, one of the night market’s organizers. “It is very disappointing for our vendors and of course for the people who have been coming to our events, but we’re all in this together.”
The most recent Christmas market had around 70 vendors, several food trucks and local breweries and entertainment.
McDonald said they were looking into expanding the summer market event even further than its Christmas counterpart, but the pandemic halted the planning process fairly quickly. The summer market is already set to return in 2021 and the loss of this year’s event puts organizers in the unique position of being able to transform the future markets.
“The positive side of it is it does give us some time, a lot of time, to plan for next year, to take the ideas we were planning for this year and maybe add more,” McDonald said. “We are very positive about how our event will look next year.”
McDonald said they’re going to likely give future markets a theme and “incorporate more of the Dresden community into it.” That includes getting more local businesses and organizations involved in the events.
The night markets are a huge team effort, McDonald said, where the entire community comes together to make them happen.
“I do see it as a truly community event run by the community, for the community,” she said.
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