The Christmas Towns

Some towns decorate for Christmas and some towns become Christmas, and the difference is a century of practice. The Christmas towns are the ones where December is the high season or ought to be, where the lights go up with a craftsman's seriousness, the historic districts were built to hold candlelight, and the whole place seems to have been waiting all year for the first cold evening. Visiting one in season is among the most reliable pleasures in American travel, and among the least attempted.

The good Christmas towns share a temperament with all the places this magazine loves, which is that the show is not staged for visitors. The wreaths on the Victorian porches of Cape May are a town competition older than anyone participating, the farolitos on the walls of Santa Fe are a devotion before they are a display, and the greenery on the doors of Williamsburg is judged, formally, by neighbors. The visitor is welcome at all of it, and none of it would stop if the visitors stayed home.

This edition makes the December rounds. It goes to Cape May for the lamplight and the gingerbread, to Newport where the great houses dress for the season at full Gilded Age scale, to Santa Fe for the most beautiful Christmas Eve walk in the country, to Williamsburg where the holiday is kept an entire century older, and to Savannah, which hangs its Christmas under the live oaks and takes the whole month to do it.

Book December the way you would book July at the beach, early and without apology, since the Christmas towns have small inventories and long memories. Pack for the cold, plan around the first two weeks of the month when the show is up and the crowds are still manageable, and take at least one evening walk with nowhere to be. That walk is the product. Everything else is wrapping.