From Zurich Magical Christmas Markets of Colmar and Strasbourg

Leave Zurich in the morning in a private Mercedes with your own English-speaking driver and be in Strasbourg before eleven — no trains, no connections, no dragging shopping bags through stations. Strasbourg is the official Capital of Christmas, and it has earned it: the Christkindelsmärik has been running since 1570, and today more than 300 wooden chalets spread across eleven squares of the old town, under the illuminated Gothic cathedral and the Great Christmas Tree of Place Kléber. You have the time to walk it at your own pace — mulled wine, bredele biscuits, Alsatian crafts — with no group to follow and no clock to watch. Then your driver takes you 70 km south to Colmar, the most photographed Christmas town in Europe. Six separate markets, timber-framed houses in every colour, canals lit up in Petite Venise, and the fairytale streets that inspired the village in Disney's Beauty and the Beast. You stay until the lights are at their most beautiful, then we drive you straight back ..