Santa Fe does Christmas with paper bags and piñon smoke, and nothing else in America looks like it. There is no snow globe downtown, no single famous tree, no mile of department-store windows. Instead, on Christmas Eve, thousands of farolitos — paper bags weighted with sand and lit with a candle — line the adobe […]
St. Augustine does Christmas the way only America’s oldest city can: it does not build a Christmas attraction, it lights the whole city. For the 33rd year, more than three million white lights go up across some twenty blocks of the historic district — draped over palm trees and Spanish colonial balconies, strung along St. […]
Leavenworth does Christmas like nowhere else in America. This is a real Bavarian-style village tucked into the Cascade Mountains of Washington, where every timber-framed storefront, balcony and tree downtown is wrapped in light from Thanksgiving through February. More than half a million lights glow above Front Street, carolers sing in the snow, Santa arrives at […]
Austin does Christmas in a T-shirt — and that is exactly why it works. December days are typically in the low-to-mid 60s Fahrenheit and nights in the 40s, so you can walk a two-million-light trail in a park, stand under a 155-foot tree made of lights, browse an artisan market and eat tacos under string […]
San Diego does Christmas in a T-shirt — and that is exactly why it works. December days are typically in the mid-60s Fahrenheit and nights in the low 50s, so you can watch a parade of light-covered boats cross the bay, skate beside the Pacific and walk a garden full of lights in the same […]
Orlando does Christmas in short sleeves — and that is the whole point. December days average a high in the low 70s Fahrenheit and nights in the mid-50s, so you will be watching fireworks over a castle, walking a garden full of lights and standing curbside at a parade in a light jacket, not a […]
Miami does not do a white Christmas. It does something arguably better: Christmas outdoors, in December, without a coat. Palms hold the lights instead of pines, gardens stay open after dark, the bay carries evening cruises, and the season stretches from early November all the way to Three Kings Day in January. If you want […]
San Antonio does Christmas on the water. While other cities light a single tree in a single square, San Antonio switches on 200,000 lights draped over the bald cypress trees along its downtown River Walk, and it does it from a parade of illuminated floats on the river itself. The result is a Christmas that […]
Houston does Christmas without pretending to be a snow globe. There is no reliable snowfall, and nobody here expects one. What Houston does offer is scale: one of the country’s biggest zoo light shows, a stadium’s worth of lights in Sugar Land, an ice-sculpture world an hour away in Galveston, a 55-foot tree over an […]
Dallas does Christmas on a big, warm, Texas scale. There are no guarantees of snow, but there are garden lights by White Rock Lake, a classic downtown parade, an indoor ice rink wrapped around a towering tree, glowing animal lanterns at the zoo, and German-style market stalls a short drive away in Arlington. It is […]
