The Mansions Keep Christmas

Newport's summer cottages, covered in these pages in their high-season glory, keep a second season the crowds mostly miss. From Thanksgiving through New Year, the preservation society dresses the greatest of the mansions for the holidays at the scale the houses demand, trees rising two stories in marble halls, dining tables laid for gilded-age feasts that never quite ended, poinsettias by the thousand, and evening hours when the great rooms glow against the winter dark, and the city around them runs its own wreathed and wharf-lit December at a fraction of July's density.

The dressed houses are the season's headline, the grandest of the cottages decorated room by room with a curatorial seriousness that stops just short of wink, the breakfast rooms and ballrooms staged as if the families were due back from the opera, and the special evening openings, halls lit, choirs sometimes singing from the staircases, delivering the gilded age at its most persuasive hour. The house museums publish their holiday calendars in fall, the evening tickets book first, and the daytime visits run gently even on weekends, per the off-season arithmetic of these pages.

The city matches the effort at street level, the wharves and the colonial blocks hung with greenery and white lights, the shopping streets trading at strolling pace, the chowder houses and taverns cooking their winter best, and the cliff walk, it should be said, running its full drama in the cold, surf against the empty lawns of the very houses just toured. Illuminated boat parades and tree lightings fill the early-December weekends, and the inns' fireplace rooms run the season at their most persuasive terms.

Book one evening mansion opening and a fireplace inn together, walk the cliff walk at winter golden hour regardless of temperature, and take the chowder afterward as constitutional medicine. The cottages were built for entertaining on a scale their eight-week summers never exhausted, and December, marble halls glowing and crowds gone home, is when the houses finally get the party, and the visitor, wonderfully, is on the list.