Holiday travel is either an escape from the chaos or an excuse to join it. Browse seasonal destinations, holiday markets, festive experiences, and tips for traveling during the busiest times of year.
Active travel after fifty works best when the activity fits your body rather than your ego: a walking holiday, an easy cycling route, or a paddling trip that engages without punishing the knees. The right pace often leaves you feeling better at the end of the trip than when you started.
A New Year’s Eve at home can easily outshine an expensive night out, but only if you treat it as a plan rather than a fallback. A thoughtful menu, a short guest list, and a midnight tradition give the evening something to look forward to.
Fall travel trades summer’s heat and crowds for thinner lines, softer prices, and milder days, at places that spend July overrun. The downside is a shorter season and less predictable weather, which is exactly why the timing rewards some flexibility.
A walking holiday changes what you notice: at three miles an hour, the ground between destinations becomes the trip, not a blur past a car window. The draw isn’t fitness but a slower way of seeing a place, arriving somewhere having actually crossed the distance to it.
Cutting your own Christmas tree turns an errand into an outing, which is the whole appeal. The tree you drag home is rarely more perfect than a lot’s, but the cold walk, the cocoa, the choosing together become the memory the ornament boxes never hold.
Holiday travel packs in complications a normal trip skips, gifts to transport unbroken, a nice outfit or two, cold-weather layers, and a return trip somehow fuller than the outbound. A little planning for the extras keeps the season’s stress out of the security line.
Snowshoeing is one of the easiest winter sports to learn. If you can walk, you can snowshoe. The challenge isn’t skill. It’s dressing warmly and choosing terrain that matches your fitness level.
Spending the holidays abroad swaps your own traditions for a city’s version of them, and whether that delights or deflates depends on what you wanted from the season. The markets, lights, and rituals of a new place can feel genuinely magical. They can also make you ache for home. Go for the novelty, not to replace what you’ll miss.
Houston offers a Christmas without the shivering, which is its whole appeal to anyone worn out by cold-weather holidays. The lights, the markets, the ice rinks under a mild sky deliver the season’s spirit minus the frostbite. It’s the holidays for people who love the season but not its weather.
A single good bottle is gone by New Year’s. A wine club keeps arriving all year, and that repetition is the gift. Each delivery is a small occasion, and a low-stakes way to discover bottles you’d never have picked yourself.
Costa Rica packs an astonishing amount of wildlife into a small country, but seeing it takes more than showing up. The animals reveal themselves to patience and a good guide, at dawn, from a quiet trail, through eyes trained to spot them. Slow down, book the naturalist, and the forest fills with creatures you’d have walked right past.
Wakesurfing is the friendliest way into board sports for people who assumed they’d missed the boat. The boat’s slow, the falls are soft, and most beginners are up and riding the same day. It’s gentler on the body than wakeboarding and less daunting than ocean surfing, which makes it a rare water sport the whole family can actually share.
A calmer Christmas usually begins with doing less, not more. Fewer commitments and a clearer sense of what matters most leave more room to enjoy the season.
A cut Christmas tree gives a few glorious weeks and then a needle-dropping goodbye. A container-grown tree offers a different bargain: a little more care in exchange for a living tree that comes back year after year. For anyone tired of the annual haul to the curb, it’s the version of the tradition that doesn’t end in the trash.
The college gift that lands solves the small realities of dorm life rather than decorating it. The practical comforts, the things that make a cramped room livable or a long semester easier, get used daily long after the novelty gifts are forgotten. Shop for the life she’s actually living, not the one on the packaging.
The holidays give Boston’s grand hotels a different atmosphere. Seasonal menus and festive events at Bar Boulud make it easy to turn an evening in the city into part of the celebration.
Decked for the holidays, Newport’s Gilded Age mansions come closest to feeling lived-in: candlelight, towering trees, and rooms staged the way a Vanderbilt Christmas might have looked. It’s the season the grandeur turns warm instead of museum-cold.
The Newport Mansions take on a different character during the holidays. Seasonal decorations add another layer to homes that were already designed to impress.