The Toronto Christmas Market is a massive holiday spectacle that will attract over a quarter of a million people into the red brick denizens of the historic Distillery District at 55 Mill St in the city's harbour portlands - the oldest part of what was once called Muddy York. I took a walk around the place on Friday morning, before the crowds showed up, to capture some great shots of the cobblestones streets and wooden vendor shacks all lined up and waiting for their tenants.

Toronto Christmas Market

The old fashioned clock is fitted with a selenium solar cap that makes a small electric current to power an elecromagnet that holds open a reed switch which when closed, in the absense of the sunlight powered magnet, another current opens a circuit to power the bulbs behind the clock's enormous faces. These entire white frontispieces are illuminated , or rather they become the light sources and they generate an immense glow that lights up the entire courtyard. Toronto mortgage broker

The clock has been damaged by delivery trucks reversing three times in the last three years, and now it has metal barriers erected around it's base - but they are quite low to the ground and I wonder if they are not perhaps too short. It seems to me most delivery trucks have rather tall rear bumpers. Beep beeep beep - we could be back where we started.