The Holiday Address

There is a particular kind of American town that knows what December is for, and has known for a long time, one that strings its lights along the same streets where they have always been strung, fills its inns with the same families who filled them a generation before, and treats the whole arrangement not as a performance but as a reasonable thing that happens to fall on the calendar every year. People have been arriving at these places for the holiday weeks since well before anyone thought to photograph them, and the towns have simply kept the fires going, the tables set, and the rooms available to those who know to book before they think they need to.

This issue collects the places the returning tend to agree on, the ones that earn the trip rather than merely decorate for it, where the Christmas market or the candlelight tour or the inn with the wreath on the door is the occasion but the town itself is the reason. They are not all obvious, and a few of them are worth the winding approach, since the towns that hold their character in December are usually the ones that held it in July and October as well, their sense of themselves running deeper than the season. The regulars will tell you the shoulder weeks on either side of the holiday are frequently the finest, quieter than the peak, with the preparations still up and the crowds already gone.

Everything in these pages assumes you have waited a year already and would prefer not to wait another, which is the correct posture for any of it. Book the inn before summer ends if the destination is popular, before early autumn if it is merely well known, and do not let the calendar convince you that December is far away. The towns that dress for it best have always filled from the inside out, the regulars first, the newcomers who become regulars second, and the rest after that. Come prepared to become the kind of person who plans this in August, because that is precisely who these places were built for.