Christmas Prelude

Kennebunkport opens December with Christmas Prelude, the festival it has run for four decades across the month's first two weekends, when the summer colony that does not change, per its piece in these pages, changes into its winter dress, a tree built of stacked lobster traps and buoys lit in Dock Square to open the season, carolers and hat parades working the streets, the inns pouring cocoa and something stronger, and, some years, actual snow arriving on cue over the harbor. It is New England's Christmas postcard, animated, and it books like one.

The prelude's program runs deep for a small town, the tree lighting and the caroling in the square as the anchor events, the candlelight caroling at the seaside chapel and the church fairs carrying the sacred register, the pancake breakfasts, hat parade, and fireworks over the river carrying the profane, and Santa arriving, correctly for this coast, by lobster boat, which is the festival's signature image and the harbor's best photograph of the year. The shops and galleries of the square trade late by lamplight, and the inns' fires run at full ceremony.

The mechanics follow the festival rules of these pages at their strictest, the town's inns booking out many months ahead for both weekends at peak terms, the mid-festival week and the weekends after delivering the same lights and the wreathed captains' houses at gentler arithmetic, and the dressing code being honest Maine December, boots and layers rated for caroling outdoors in the twenties.

Book by summer for the prelude weekends proper, arrive Friday ahead of the Saturday crowds, and take the walk to the point, per the town's standing method, in its winter version, surf and spruce and woodsmoke. Watch Santa's lobster boat come in with the children even without children. The town keeps its summers unchanged as a policy, per its founding piece, and its Decembers it decorates, briefly and completely, which is the one change everyone endorses.