Newport Dresses the Mansions

The great houses of Newport were built by families who did not understand the concept of enough, and Christmas is the one season when that failing becomes an unqualified public good. Every winter the preservation society dresses the grandest of the mansions for the holidays, trees to the ceilings, dining tables laid for dinners that will never be served, poinsettias by the thousand under chandeliers the size of carriages, and the houses, frankly, have never looked more like themselves.

The regulars will tell you December is the connoisseur's month in Newport, and they are not wrong. The summer crowds are seven months away, the tours move at a human pace, and the houses reward the slowness, since the point of a seventy-room cottage was always the detail, the carved ceilings and the marble stairs, and detail needs time. The grandest of the Vanderbilt houses anchors the circuit, dressed stem to stern, and the evening hours, when the rooms are lit and the windows glow out over the winter lawns, are the ones worth planning around.

The town below the mansions keeps its own December. The colonial streets by the harbor hang their greens, the wharves light their masts, and the restaurants that feed Newport year round run fires and chowder against the sea wind. The Cliff Walk stays open all winter, and taking a stretch of it on a bright cold morning, the ocean on one side and the sleeping palaces on the other, is the season's secret pleasure, shared with almost no one.

Book a December weekend, pair one evening mansion visit with one morning one, and leave the afternoons for the harbor streets and the long lunches. The Gilded Age built these houses to impress people at parties. The parties ended generations ago, but every December the houses dress for one anyway, and everyone is finally invited.