It’s the perfect time of year to travel – if you can swallow the excessive peak season fees that is. For a start you’ve been pushed to your limits at work and need a break before you find yourself wandering into the board room in a Boba Fett costume and telling everyone you’re leaving to pursue a career as a private investigator (it has happened), and travel is the greatest break there is: a change of scenery, of people and of temperature. And speaking of temperature, Christmas travel is the perfect time for a hemisphere swap – sick of frostbite in Calgary? Try skin cancer in Cronulla. Sick of the coconutty scent of sunscreen in the Cook Islands (this probably hasn’t happened)? Try a hot chocolate in Rome. (Seriously, do try a hot chocolate in Rome – I had one so thick my spoon was upright. Took me four days to walk off the calories).
However – all this wonderful travel leaves you with a problem – at least if you celebrate Christmas. (If you don’t – party on through till New Year’s – you’re fine). What do you do on Christmas day when you are in a foreign city, with no family and all the usual venues are closing down? Lucky you – we’ve compiled a list of five of the best Christmas day options around the globe. You’ll find some fellow kindred spirits, do some good and have a day to remember.
- New York: Obviously this city is the ideal place to travel in December. Its cold – but its not Chicago cold. There are more seasonal offerings than you could ever fit into a month – think ice skating at Rockefeller, a lights tour passed the Lincoln Centre and the Time Warner Centre, the window displays at Macy’s and a carriage ride through Central Park. And of course there is HONY for the Holidays. The Humans of New York blog is not only synonymous with New York city, it is one of the most popular Facebook book pages (16 millions likes), has spawned three best selling books, has provoked several record breaking crowd-funding campaigns and of course – is your ticket to a brilliant Christmas dinner in NY. HONY for the Holidays is an initiative that matches guests and hosts – people with nowhere to go, with people who have a spare seat at their Christmas table. If you email through the folks at HONY will match you up, get you started on a conversation and make sure the experience ends with great food and conversation instead of crackers and a paper hat alone in your hotel room.
- A brilliant way to spend your Christmas day in Sydney is to volunteer at one of the huge Christmas lunches thrown by many of the cities charity organisations. The Wayside Chapel throws a lunch for community members and needs people to help serve up food, the Salvos run a huge free lunch program on Christmas day at Australian Technology Park, and if you happen to be travelling with a car – consider offering to deliver Christmas lunches for Meals on Wheels and having a chat with one of hundreds of people home alone on the day. This might be your chance to make someone else’s Christmas an amazing one.
- If you are in London for Christmas you really need to have a pub lunch – its just the right thing to do. And while there aren’t a lot of places open on December 25th, The Orange Public House and Hotel is, and it serves the most London of food possible. Think duck liver with chestnuts or bronze turkey with pumpkin and baby carrots. Or, if you prefer something that wasn’t sentient – a beetroot and chard pie. And wait for it – one of the dessert options is a roasted pear, custard brioche, gingerbread parfait. Stop it!
- We’ll assume you spent Christmas Eve in Paris in a food coma. What you need on Christmas day is something active. Parisians love to get out and about on the 25th and you can join them, without the horror of your phones GPS, but booking a Christmas walking tour with Discover Walks. You don’t have to stick with a group, you can organise a private tour and take in some of the cities most festive icons – the twenty free carousels around the city for example, the window displays of the Grand Magasins and then (leave the kids at the hotel) and wander through Montmatre for dinner at the Moulin Rouge.
- There is a veritable slew of December events in Cape Town – its one long party. But if you got there too late for the Twilight Run (think Comicon as a marathon), then you’ll have to settle for Carols by Candlelight in the Kirstenbosch gardens. Running over four nights from December 17-20, the event is basically a picnic and concert set to some of Africa’s most legendary sunsets.
Have a great holiday season – from Ytravel!