Holidays

Monday

Alexander Larman

Holidays shouldn’t be for snobby reading

When I go on my hols this summer, I will, as ever, be taking a couple of novels with me. My golden rule for any break is only to take the kind of books that I’m actually likely to read, which not only rules out most of what I write and research, in the form of biographical and historical non-fiction, but also anything that’s going to sit in my suitcase reproachfully unopened, taking up space and leaving me feeling like an intellectual pygmy. Burying oneself in books should be an enjoyable rather than excruciating experience Last summer, I raced through an Amanda Craig, several Simon Ravens and a William Boyd. This year, for consistency, I’m hoping to pack the latest Boyd.

Flora Watkins

The joy of England’s ungentrified beaches

One of the benefits of living nearly a hundred miles from a motorway is being within 20 minutes of some of the country's best beaches. This has been a godsend during this Summer of the Five Suns. There’s no queuing on the A11 for us, behind what one of my old Norfolk friends calls ‘absolute SCUM coming down here with their caravans’. We just chuck paddleboards, towels and buckets and spades into the back of the knackered Land Rover and are in the water within half an hour. If George Orwell had written an essay about the perfect British beach, he would have had Cromer in mind But we don’t bother with the beaches that regularly top Condé Nast Traveller and Sunday Times polls.

Wednesday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

In praise of postcards

In its campaign to preserve traditional British screen-free pleasures, English Heritage is promoting a variety of wholesome pastimes this summer, such as puppet shows and fairground and circus skills. Children will lap those up; but will they respond equally enthusiastically to English Heritage’s new initiative for 2026: to revive the habit of holiday-postcard writing?  This is the vision: that their young visitors, inspired to verbal exuberance by the castle, stately home or ancient ruin they’re enjoying, will snap up a couple of the new limited-edition postcards specially commissioned by English Heritage from the artists Nick Sharratt and Quentin Blake, and (ideally in the café) will write to their grandparents, aunts, uncles and godparents.

Saturday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Long vacations are the worst

“Is there ever a holiday so heavenly that one is not counting down the days?” a friend texted me last summer, homesick in the Loire Valley. Another French friend messaged me from Montréal on day five of a holiday which, she was now regretting, she’d booked to last for nine days. She too was counting down. Having recently returned from two weeks in Cambodia with four extra days in Hanoi tacked on at the end, I counted down in sympathy. Those final four days, from Saturday morning till her flight back home on Tuesday night, seemed to drag on for ever, over a desolate weekend – and I wasn’t even there in the characterless Airbnb flat among the skyscrapers and crack addicts. “I’m longing to see that tray of food in the plane,” she texted.

Wednesday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Long holidays are the worst

‘Is there ever a holiday so heavenly that one is not counting down the days?’ a friend texted me last summer, homesick in the Loire valley. Another French friend messaged me last week from Montreal on day five of a holiday which, she was now regretting, she’d booked to last for nine days. She too was counting down. Having recently returned from a fortnight in Cambodia with four extra days in Hanoi tacked on at the end, I counted down in sympathy. Those final four days, from Saturday morning till her flight back home on Tuesday night, seemed to drag on for ever, over a desolate weekend – and I wasn’t even there in the characterless Airbnb flat among the skyscrapers and crack addicts. ‘I’m longing to see that tray of food in the plane,’ she texted.

Monday

Alec Marsh

The Mediterranean summer holiday is broken

For more than 60 years it has been an annual fixture for thousands of us, a birthright enjoyed and embraced by the children of modern, pleasure-seeking, throw-away Britain. Precisely when it happened, I couldn’t say, but at some point in the 1950s or 1960s, the trains radiating from the metropolis to the coastal resorts of Clacton-on-Sea, Southend-on-Sea, Bournemouth, Frinton, Brighton and beyond stopped heaving with Londoners. In their place a whole series of new, hitherto unfamiliar resorts zoomed into the national consciousness, heralded by the tang of aviation fuel and the promise of neverending heat and chilled cerveza.

Thursday

William Cash

Owning an Airbnb is hell

I know it can be difficult to have sympathy for anybody who owns a holiday let, but for me and my wife August is often a war between us and the holiday guests from hell. It’s an open season of refund-seeking, blackmailing guests and wild children whose parents think we operate a kids’ club in our gardens. And it’s only getting worse. We got a flavour the week that schools broke up late last month, when a group of eight adults calmly sat on the terrace in the sun, swilling cans of beer and prosecco as their pack of six children began picking up heavy pebble gravel and throwing the stones at the windows of my elderly parents’ barn.

Tuesday

Bill McMorris

The origin of Father’s Day

From our US edition

On his first day in office, President Trump signed executive orders to end DEI. Schoolchildren nationwide know that he has failed to deliver, for every June they must participate in the celebration of a federal holiday that only entered the national consciousness thanks to endorsements from ACLU radicals and Big Business eager to make a buck. Ever since Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck in 2020, the children’s art instructor has forced them to write paeans to a petulant overweight drunk. I’m speaking, of course, of Father’s Day. Father’s Day began in Washington State as a church service orchestrated by Sonora Smart Dodd, an adoring daughter who wanted to honor Dad for not falling to pieces when Mom died.

Father's

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

Texas is the perfect holiday destination

Business travel isn’t quite the perk it is cracked up to be. For one thing, you have no say about where you go or when (New Yorkers are rude about London weather, but their own city is uninhabitable for four months of the year). Even when the weather is perfect, you often have no opportunity to extend your stay, so most of your time is spent in airports and meetings. The taxi from the airport may be the cultural highlight of the whole trip. Nothing has a worse effort-to-reward ratio than staying in a hotel for a single night. And, worst of all, while you are awake at 3 a.m. watching BBC News 24 repeat itself, your colleagues assume you are lying in a hammock being brought pina coladas.

Friday

Roger Kimball

The best winter wines

From our US edition

Winter is a natural moment for a little recherche du temps perdu. For my band of serious thinkers, the usual aides-mémoire are not petites madeleines dipped in tea but some of the various wines the holidays afforded us. Wordsworth said that poetry “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” The jury is still out on the accuracy of that neatly phrased observation. But regardless of its pertinence to the art of poetry, its pertinence to the art of wine appreciation can hardly be gainsaid. With that in mind, I offer, as a minor public service, a brief recollection of some of the wines that a beneficent providence vouchsafed us as the winter solstice came and went and the house was redolent of evergreen and wood fires.

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Thursday

The Spectator

The Spectator’s 2024 Holiday Gift Guide

From our US edition

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.

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Christmas
Jane Stannus

How to host the perfect Christmas party

From our US edition

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.

Thursday

Adrian Pascu-Tulbure

The joy of hiring an old banger

There is always much to look forward to on a holiday with friends in France (the day one supermarket sweep, boules under plane trees, foie gras on demand); but, for me, one of the greatest joys is the hire car. That’s entirely due to my indulging in the niche pastime of driving around in the worst, most clapped out vehicle possible. You can do this quite easily in France using an Airbnb-style platform called Turo which allows you to go directly to the – usually bemused – owner and, for not very much money, drive off in whatever they have to offer you. And so it was that I found myself this summer burbling down vineyard-flanked routes départementales in a 32-year-old, one-litre Peugeot with paint flaking off and every panel dented.

Thursday

Kate Andrews

In praise of Halloween food

From our US edition

If you’re hesitant to ask someone if they are American or Canadian — the latter are often offended to be mistaken for the former — ask them instead about their favorite holiday. It isn’t a foolproof method, but if they say Halloween then you know you’re talking to an American. No other nationality would choose it — because no one else gets it so right. The origins of All Hallows’ Eve belong to Ireland and Scotland. The Celtic festival Samhain was not only a huge feast to mark the start of winter: it was a day full of superstitious activity, which included bonfires to clear the air of ghosts and sacrifices to appease anything all-powerful that might curse food supplies during the dark months.

Halloween

Saturday

Oscar Edmondson

The politics of prime ministerial holidays

14 min listen

Should Keir Starmer go on holiday whilst the country is still grappling with violent disorder? In a YouGov poll on Thursday 71% of those surveyed said he shouldn’t. The PM is meant to be heading off on a summer break on Monday but that is looking increasingly unlikely. We still haven’t got the final word from No.10 but we we thought it was a good opportunity to take a look at the politics of prime ministerial holidays. Oscar Edmondson speaks to Katy Balls and Jon Rentoul, chief political commentator at the Independent.  Produced by Oscar Edmondson.

Thursday

Jane Stannus

How eggs became the symbol of Easter

From our US edition

Thirty feet in the air off a northern Canadian highway stands the giant Vegreville Easter egg, rotating gently in the wind. The egg is eighteen feet wide, nearly twenty-five long and designed to turn with the breeze like a weathervane. It is decorated in a traditional Ukrainian pysanka pattern with thousands of gold, black and white aluminum triangles, for the egg is an homage to the Ukrainian immigrants who settled the area long ago. It is a technical feat: the tile- cutting technology developed to produce the mosaic on the egg’s curved surface was later used to tile the exterior of the Space Shuttle. Whatever day of the year you may spy it, it is undeniably an Easter egg.

Easter

Tuesday

Teresa Mull

Groundhog Day, a break in the bleakness of winter

From our US edition

February is the worst month and everybody knows it. The awkward number of days, the wretched weather. Even the way it’s spelled is irritating. Yet just when you think your raging Seasonal Affective Disorder will get the best of you, February, of all months, offers a break in the bleakness that’s been indomitable since New Year’s. It’s absurd, hokey and best of all, like the Pennsylvania Dutch who invented it, immune to politics. Which is why Groundhog Day should be a national holiday instead of just a regional one. Groundhog Day seemed like a big deal when I was a kid.

groundhog

Tuesday

The Spectator

The Spectator’s 2023 Holiday Gift Guide

From our US edition

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.

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rolf's
Zack Christenson

Deck the halls at Rolf’s

From our US edition

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.

roman
Mary Kate Skehan

Surviving the holidays with Alison Roman

From our US edition

The holidays are here. If you’re like me, you may view the year’s major baking season with slight dread, not because you’re a Scrooge, but because you lack confidence, patience or skill as a baker. Recipe developer and cooking influencer Alison Roman has written a cookbook for people like us, who find the “science” of baking frustrating compared to the “art” of cooking. The cookbook, Sweet Enough, affirms this preference; in a section called “What I Hate about Baking,” Roman lists gripes: “I hate when I mess up and feel like I wasted hours of my life.” Same. But this book, written with non-bakers in mind, is for the most part flexible and forgiving, and may well become your companion this December.