Christmas

Friday

Gage Klipper

The chaotic thrill of a horse auction

The story of Harry deLeyer and his horse Snowman reads like a Disney classic. DeLeyer was a Dutch immigrant farmer who bought Snowman at auction with his last $80 in the 1950s . Snowman was an unpedigreed plowhorse, already old by competitive riding standards, and likely headed for the glue factory when deLeyer saw promise in his strength and spirit. They went on to become one of the most successful pairings in the history of showriding, taking home the Triple Crown of national titles in 1958. The horse world has changed a lot since then. Both training and breeding are highly scientific across all pursuits, from showriding to racing.

Tuesday

Neal Pollack

Santa Trump’s Christmas economy cheer

I hate to be the bearer of good news, but the US economy is doing quite well. A delayed government report shows that third-quarter GDP grew at 4.3 percent, hardly a record, but still healthy, the highest growth rate in two years. Last week’s inflation report showed a lower-than-expected number, and wage growth is exceeding inflation. Consumer spending is up, and, yes, the stock market is booming. Happy days are here again. The sky above is clear again. Many accounts on my X feed, which are either run by Democratic partisans or Iranian trolls or both, say that food-pantry lines are reaching record numbers this holiday season, and that poverty and homelessness are increasing even as the rich get richer. “Trump lies,” they said. Yes, and the sun is hot. What’s the point?

Trump
Joseph D'Hippolito 

This Christmas, listen to Mary Did You Know?

A popular and poignant Christmas song, written late in the previous century for a church’s holiday program, incites passionate criticism from those who disagree with the way it phrases its message. Since first being recorded in 1991, “Mary, Did You Know?” has been performed by soloists and groups ranging from Carrie Underwood and Dolly Parton to Pentatonix, CeeLo Greene and Kathleen Battle. The lyrics are a series of questions to Mary, Jesus’s mother, asking whether she knew during his infancy about the profound impact he would make as an adult. Yet that powerful literary device annoys those who believe the song demeans its subject.

Wednesday

Josie Cox

Hold on to your peppermint mochaccinos – the Rockettes are not from New York City

In some ways, it feels like I stepped off the plane at JFK from London mere days ago – wide-eyed, naive and still convinced that “winter” would be charming and cozy rather than a six-month endurance test in avoiding frostbite. Yet here I am, somehow entering my sixth year of participating in the annual pageant that is the New York holiday season: that weeks-long spectacle beginning with the first delicate whiff of PSL-something and ending in the far-too-slowly receding hangover on an insultingly arctic New Year’s Day. The first year, Covid-tinted and therefore emotionally reminiscent of a half-deflated Macy’s parade balloon, was not what one might call festive. But things have really picked up since.

rockettes
Marc Oestreich

The joy of Jell-O

My grandmother lived on a Christmas tree farm in Indiana. December weekends meant hauling evergreens, pulling needles from our socks and pretending I was far more help than hindrance. But the real event – the thing the whole month orbited – was Christmas Day dinner: the good china, the stiff grace and the quiet family rule that no one under 20 offered up an opinion unless asked. The table was a study in American aspiration: a ham glossy with cloves, wassail steaming on the hob, potatoes whipped into obedient fluff, canned cranberry sauce still bearing its aluminum-molded rings… and always, inevitably, the Jell-O. There were several, because my family believed in abundance, even when the abundance quivered. Aunt Deb and Uncle Fritz arrived with their famed Jell-O eggs.

Friday

Plum Sykes

How I won over a Scrooge-like New Yorker

Like all men, my dear friend Chris Black is an absolutely terrible person to shop with. He behaves only marginally better than a boy toddler. As we stood on the street outside Fortnum’s, this New Yorker’s greeting to me was, “I’m not really a Christmassy kind of person.” How anyone could say this when they are about to enter the Father Christmas of department stores is beyond me. Fortnum & Mason, with its crimson carpets and twirling mahogany doors, counters groaning with marzipan and chocolate and its gracious staircases and red-coated butlers transport even the most jaded shopper to a gentler time when Christmas shopping was an “outing,” one that you dressed up for, before people had even imagined scroll-and-click retail.

cape cod boston christmas
Amy Rose Everett

A Boston tea party and Christmas time on Cape Cod

Boston Harbor Hotel, 6:42 a.m. I tossed on a robe, had a fight with an unfamiliar coffee machine, then threw back my bedroom curtains to soak up the best part of chronic jet lag. Fuschia skies intensified before a beautifully fat, gold sun peeped above the horizon. Some hours later, a three-tier stand stacked with PB&J sandwiches, smoked salmon, vanilla bean scones and fig jam obscured the same uninterrupted view, from the Rowes Wharf Sea Grille downstairs. Proffered a frankly overwhelming selection of colorful loose leaf teas, the irony wasn’t lost on me, a Brit, as I raised a pinky. “Green Sparkling… Tropical Oolong… Organic Big Ben English Breakfast… Chai Imperial? How about L’Herboriste?

Saturday

Matthew and Camila McConaughey

Matthew and Camila McConaughey’s signature Christmas cocktail recipe

Our Santa Pants cocktail is one of our go-to holiday pours when hosting at this time of year. Made with our organic tequila and ginger beer, cranberry juice and fresh lime, it brings all the sparkle and cheer of the season. It is like Christmas in a glass. And while the world doesn’t need another celebrity tequila, it could use a shot of fun. So this Christmas, enjoy yourself and keep the holiday spirit flowing. Here’s how to make it. Ingredients – 60ml Pantalones Organic Tequila – 60ml cranberry juice – 15ml lime juice – Top with ginger beer – Garnish: sugar rim, cranberries, rosemary Rim the edge of a rocks glass with a lime wedge, dip the rim in sugar to coat and set aside.

Tuesday

Jane Stannus

How to make an unforgettable Christmas dinner

In the early 1970s, celebrity chef Jacques Pépin and his wife bought a dilapidated house in the Catskills so they could go skiing on the weekends. It was a real fixer-upper. Groups of friends would come up from New York City and pitch in on the renovation effort, and Pépin would serve dinner at the end of the day. These weekends were so much fun Pépin decided to memorialize them by hand-lettering and painting special menus. How Pépin convinced his friends to let him sit in the kitchen sketching petits poissons and heads of broccoli while they slaved away at framing and drywalling his winter getaway is, admittedly, mysterious.

Christmas

Tuesday

Dan Fox

My quest for the perfect Christmas broccoli

I adore broccoli, but I despise seeing it shrink-wrapped and kidnapped in the grocery store. The sight of those slightly compressed, yellowing florets sweating under fluorescent morgue lighting is a rude tap on the shoulder from dystopia. That’s why I was in my basement in late August, cleaning out the propagation tent while everyone else was still at the beach. My goal each year is to enjoy homegrown broccoli with Christmas dinner. In this corner of the Mediterranean, that’s about as likely as a French civil servant answering the phone after lunch. But with precision timing and bloody-mindedness you can pull it off. And after years of suffering those supermarket specimens, I’m determined to.

broccoli

Tuesday

Cockburn

Trump starts Christmas now

There’s no small irony in the fact that Texas Democratic state legislators, fleeing a congressional redistricting attempt by Texas’s Republican majority, have sought shelter in Illinois. They’re acting like political refugees in what is, in fact, the most gerrymandered state in the country. Look at Illinois District 13, which snakes up from the Missouri border nearly to the gates of Indiana, bisecting the state (and District 15) like Illinois’s small intestine. Chicago is a very populous city, but the state has carved up its Congressional districts like a turducken, giving us as many (D-Chicagos) as humanly possible. The Illinois Democratic machine has had an outsized influence on American politics, much less Illinois politics, for decades.

President Trump tracks Santa in 2018 (Getty)

Thursday

Neal Pollack

Is America in the grip of Empty Shelves panic?

The morning of President Trump’s 100th day in office brought fresh tariff melodrama with the coffee, eggs and toast, as a report emerged suggesting Amazon was considering listing the exact cost of a US tariff surcharge next to all goods purchased on the site. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt immediately snarled from the podium that this was a “hostile and political act,” though it was really neither hostile nor political. Regardless, Amazon immediately rolled it back, claiming the story had been misreported by Punchbowl News.  “The team that runs our ultra low-cost Amazon Haul store has considered listing import charges on certain products,” a spokesman said.

empty shelves

Thursday

Scott Jennings

My top 2024 takeaways by Scott Jennings, CNN’s ‘Black Sheep’

New York "Black Sheep.” Not a nickname I expected, but my friends and family get a kick out of the Daily Mail’s moniker for me following a series of viral CNN moments. It’s more accurate than “Lonely Scott,” which Bill Maher applied after watching our network’s coverage of the Democratic National Convention. I am anything but lonely these days. In the wee hours following Donald Trump’s win over Kamala Harris, I impatiently wait my turn on CNN to explain what happened.

scott jennings

Thursday

Drea de Matteo

Drea de Matteo’s Italian-American Christmas

Los Angeles, California The Italians take their holidays very seriously. We live in California, so winter isn’t really tangible; we pretend we’re freezing when it’s 60 degrees out. For food, the Italians always would prepare the Feast of the Seven Fishes. But since my grandma and dad are gone, we’ve shied away from a lot of the tradition; it’s a really heavy load to make that meal. We do some of it; I’ll do a pasta with a lobster sauce. Some Christmases we’ve made a Genovese sauce, with meat that’s cooked for about eight hours with like thirty onions and butter. We would cook for forty-five people on Christmas Eve and then thirty people on Christmas Day. On Christmas Day it was always lasagna.

drea de matteo italian-american christmas
The Spectator

The Spectator’s 2024 Holiday Gift Guide

Matt McDonald, managing editor As we grow older, the idea is that we become wiser. I’ve decided to buck that trend by making progressively dumber decisions that put me further from my goals of attaining professional success, home ownership, emotional stability and nirvana. The most recent of these is increasing the distances I’ve been running; I will be attempting a half-marathon back home on the south coast of England the week before Christmas, with a view to running my first marathon in Berlin next fall. It’s unclear why we as a species decided to adopt the practice of doing marathons a couple of millennia ago — the first man to do it did die at the end, after all.

gift
Jane Stannus

How to host the perfect Christmas party

Cool guests, hot food; cool music, warm hostess: the recipe for the perfect party, and the motto of Perle Mesta, one of the most successful postwar Washington hostesses. Good King Wenceslas, a model host of even greater status, lived out this motto in legendary style centuries earlier. His guests were cool, if not downright frozen; their host was warm of heart (and sole, as the page discovered on treading in his footprints). The food was hot, for the king ordered up pine logs along with the flesh and wine. As for the music, the rude wind’s wild lament must have been on the cool side — though jollier tunes would surely have prevailed once the king and his fellow diners made it back to the royal fireside.

Christmas
Matt McDonald

Crossing the Atlantic at Christmas

Christmas travel dates back to... well, do a hundred donkey-miles from Nazareth to Bethlehem count? I’m sure irritating New Atheists fixated on when, exactly, the Judaean lambing season is would argue that it doesn’t. My festive journey has consisted of a return flight over the ocean for the last nine years — with the exception of 2020; I wonder why. A recent review of my calendar reveals that I’ve made over fifty transatlantic crossings in that time. My yuletide offering to our subscribers is the knowledge I have picked up along the way. If your schedule permits, flights seven to ten days before and after Christmas Day always work out significantly cheaper than those closer to the big day.

travel

Thursday

Amy Rose Everett

How to celebrate Christmas in London

You just can’t beat London at Christmas. Unless you’re lining up to get into the Tube station (never mind onto a train) at Oxford Circus, in the pissing rain. Then you’re better off in one of those glass igloos in Finland.  When I’m in town for the holidays, I find myself returning to a few old faithfuls, with a few old faithfuls. The Zetter Marylebone Keep this gem up your sleeve for when the crowds become a little too much. A warren of sumptuous suites and a lavish, candlelit parlor awaits at dinky Zetter Marylebone hotel, just a couple of streets back from shopping mecca Selfridges. Divide and conquer last-minute shopping with Mom, then meet here at lunchtime for a swift recovery.

christmas london

Tuesday

The Spectator

The Spectator’s 2023 Holiday Gift Guide

Matt McDonald, Managing Editor I am much better at buying gifts for others than I am at coming up with ideas for what I want: I’ve always valued experiences and memories more than material things... which isn’t very Christmassy or helpful. That said, I best unwind outside of work by going to the cinema and turning my phone off — replacing “bad screen” with “good screen,” if you will — and so getting me a MoviePass so I can watch Dune Part Two in IMAX next year at cut-price would be worthwhile. For others... the best thing I regularly get my Irish-ish cousins is items of clothing in one of our family tartans. Scarves for the ladies, ties for the gents.

gift
rolf's
Zack Christenson

Deck the halls at Rolf’s

It’s a common lament each year — starting around October, people love to complain that the Christmas season continues to creep further and further into the fall. But for some, that creep is a welcome one. If that’s you, I know a place. At 3rd Avenue and 22nd Street in Manhattan, you can get your Christmas fill for around six months of the year — at least if you wander into the narrow German restaurant on the corner. You might almost miss it if you walk by during daylight hours. At night, it’s hard to miss. In this rather unsexy portion of Manhattan, Rolf’s has been a New York institution since 1968.