Savannah Keeps Christmas Under the Oaks

Savannah does not have to try very hard at Christmas, since a city built as a sequence of garden squares under live oaks was always going to take decoration well, and the town knows it. The lights go up into the moss, the fountains get their greenery, the trolleys sing carols, and the whole historic district spends December looking like a stage set that happens to have residents, which is roughly what Savannah looks like all year, only now with better lighting.

The season here runs warm and unhurried. December days sit in the fifties and sixties, which means the Christmas stroll happens in a sweater rather than a parka, the squares stay usable all month, and the visitor can keep the town's whole ritual calendar, the boat parade of lights on the river, the tours of the decorated house museums, the concerts in the old churches, without once suffering for it. Southern Christmas is a gentler production than the northern kind, and Savannah is its capital.

The correct December visit works the town's existing pleasures with the season laid over them. The squares at dusk, when the lights come on in the moss, replace the summer garden walk. The house museums, dressed for the period holidays they each keep, replace the standard tours. The long dinners in the old dining rooms gain fires and oyster stew, and the rooftop bars, this being Savannah, remain entirely operational and simply add blankets.

Book the first three weeks of December, stay on or near a square, and spend the evenings on foot with no fixed route, since the squares light differently and argue for different loops nightly. On the last evening, find a bench in whichever square has become yours, under the lit moss, and stay a while. The town has been keeping Christmas at this exact pace since Oglethorpe laid out the squares, and it sees no reason December should be hurried when nothing else here is.