Dec 14 2025
Christmas in Hawaiʻi looks a little different from the snowy holiday scenes printed on greeting cards. Palm trees may be wrapped in lights, families can spend Christmas afternoon at the beach, and Santa is occasionally portrayed arriving by outrigger canoe rather than sleigh. Yet beneath those tropical details is a holiday shaped by Hawaiʻi’s long …
Dec 13 2025
Christmas movies often invite us into impossibly perfect homes. Fires crackle in stone fireplaces, enormous meals emerge effortlessly from spotless kitchens, snow falls at exactly the right moment, and everyone seems to know how to decorate a tree without becoming tangled in the lights. Christmas in Connecticut had already figured out the joke in 1945. …
Dec 11 2025
Some Christmas traditions happen around the dinner table. Others involve decorating the tree, exchanging presents, baking cookies, or driving around the neighborhood to look at lights. Then there is the tradition that requires almost no preparation at all: getting comfortable on the couch and watching a favorite Christmas movie. The best Christmas movies are remarkably …
Dec 09 2025
Every December, Charlie Brown begins Christmas feeling exactly the way people are not supposed to feel during the holidays. He is unhappy. The decorations are everywhere, his friends are excited, Christmas cards are arriving, and everyone seems to understand how to participate in the season except him. Instead of sharing their enthusiasm, Charlie Brown looks …
Dec 08 2025
Few movies look more like Christmas than White Christmas. There are snowy Vermont landscapes, enormous decorated trees, fireplaces, elegant costumes, military reunions, romantic misunderstandings, and enough Irving Berlin songs to carry viewers through an entire December evening. Released by Paramount Pictures in 1954, White Christmas brought together Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney, and Vera-Ellen …
Dec 07 2025
Some of the prettiest Christmas decorations are also the simplest. Salt dough ornaments need only a few pantry ingredients, a handful of cookie cutters, and a little time in the oven, yet the finished pieces can look wonderfully timeless hanging among evergreen branches. For this version, we are keeping the design deliberately understated: classic Christmas …
Dec 06 2025
Handmade Christmas ornaments do not have to be complicated to look special. This little felt candy cane uses just a few inexpensive materials, but the combination of snowy white felt, bright red stitching, and narrow red ribbon gives it all the charm of an old-fashioned Christmas decoration. The design is especially appealing because it does …
Dec 05 2025
Sometimes the simplest Christmas activities are the ones everyone enjoys most. A stack of coloring pages, a box of crayons or colored pencils, and a quiet afternoon can provide a welcome break from shopping, wrapping, baking, traveling, and everything else that seems to fill December. This collection includes ten very different Christmas coloring designs, ranging …
Dec 03 2025
Christmas music can fill a house beautifully without anyone singing a word. Instrumental holiday albums are especially useful during the moments when Christmas music should create atmosphere rather than command attention. Piano can accompany an evening of gift wrapping. Jazz works beautifully during dinner. Acoustic guitar feels at home beside a fireplace, while orchestral and …
Dec 02 2025
A simple cardboard tube can become a surprisingly adorable Christmas decoration with a little brown thread, a bright red pom-pom, two googly eyes, and a pair of tiny twig antlers. This toilet paper roll reindeer craft is based on a wonderfully rustic design that uses brown embroidery thread wrapped around the cardboard tube instead of …
