“There’s a saying: All flowers must grow through dirt,” floral designer Hafsa Lewis tells me over lunch on a sparkling late-spring Nantucket day. “The first time I heard it, it just slapped me in the face.”

It’s easy to see why that expression hit home when you learn how Lewis found her way to floristry—and to a rebirth, of sorts—on this Massachusetts island. A series of traumatizing experiences beginning about a decade ago had left her reeling. First, she was near the Boston Marathon finish line in 2013 when the bombs went off, and she went to the aid of a gravely injured woman. Two years later, she lost her savings in a Ponzi scheme, and then in 2017 her husband abruptly left her. Devastated, she quit her job at a Boston hospital, abandoned her plan to become a mental health counselor—she holds a master’s degree in clinical psychology—and moved to Nantucket to take a bartending gig.

“It was a dark, dark time in my life. I lost 30 pounds. I had no confidence,” she says. “The only time I didn’t feel like I wanted to die was when I was surfing—or playing with flowers.”

Lewis had enjoyed dabbling in floristry as a freelancer for an event planner. But now flowers felt like her salvation, a way to lose herself in beauty when things felt so bleak. They also presented a path forward. In 2018, she launched Hafsa & Co. as a floral marketing company specializing in the kind of large-scale fresh and faux installations that businesses increasingly use to beautify their spaces, attract customers, and generate social media hits. After attending workshops in her native England, as well as in Ecuador and Mexico, to learn the mechanics of the displays (hint: it’s all about chicken wire and zip ties), she started building her portfolio.

Among Hafsa & Co.’s most enthusiastic clients is Lemon Press, the airy organic café where we’ve met for lunch. It’s owned by cousins Darya Afshari Gault and Rachel Afshari, who happen to share Lewis’s Persian heritage and her belief in the magic of flowers.

“Our first install with Hafsa was [a small piece] over the coffee bar,” says Gault. “It was so well-received—people would come in just to Instagram it—we said, ‘Wow, let’s keep going.’ ”

Now, the Hafsa & Co. touch is everywhere at the café. An ethereal 16-foot swag of preserved white blooms—hanging amaranthus, lunaria, helecho fern, and others—graces a brick wall in the dining area; a canopy of faux wisteria dangles over the bar; and a border of foraged grapevines and silk daffodils and forsythias frames the eatery’s exterior doorway. (Lewis would soon be shifting that seasonal entrance display to summery spray roses and ranunculus.)

Lewis has also “flowered” the Artists Association of Nantucket gallery, the Nantucket Hotel, the Nantucket Dreamland movie theater, and a host of boutiques both on and off the island. She’s done displays for annual events including the Nantucket Wine & Food Festival, the Christmas Stroll, and the Daffodil Festival; made custom pieces for private parties (floral crowns, anyone?); and presented workshops for aspiring florists.

In 2021, the noted Los Angeles–based fine-art photographer Gray Malin enlisted Lewis to create elaborate floral props for a series of vignettes he’d come to the island to shoot. That same year and again in 2022, the local Coast Guard station asked her to put her creative touch on the iconic seasonal wreaths—daffodils in spring and poinsettias at Christmastime—that it hangs on the Brant Point lighthouse. (Lewis wasn’t involved with the 2023 daffodil wreath, which was delayed by lighthouse renovations, and then made and hung at the last minute by the Coast Guard when repairs were complete.) 

Like most small-business owners, she’s faced challenges. When Covid hit, she stayed afloat by making and delivering $50 bouquets with inspirational messages to residents who were stuck at home. Then in 2022, Nantucket’s Sign Advisory Council questioned whether her temporary outdoor installations were technically “signs” and therefore subject to a permitting process, a red tape–heavy requirement that likely would have sunk her business. Some detractors also sniffed that her displays were not appropriate on Nantucket.

Lewis went to every council meeting for six weeks to argue that her pieces were not signs—and that they were no different from the flower boxes most shops maintain. “I also wanted them to know the reason they were seeing more installations is because our community wants them. They make people happy.”

The controversy ended when the town unexpectedly ordered the council to disband before it made any recommendations. “And I’m still here to flower another day,” she says, smiling broadly.

Through it all, Lewis has remained mindful of what drew her to flowers: their power to heal, to express joy and sorrow, and to forge connections.

“The science part of my brain,” she says, “is really interested in how therapeutic flowers can be”—so interested, in fact, that she’s starting a doctorate program in clinical psychology this year with the idea of one day using flowers in a counseling practice.

“We have art therapy and pet therapy,” she says. “Why not flower therapy?”

There’s a bit more to the tale of how Hafsa Lewis blossomed on Nantucket. Those Coasties she helped with the lighthouse wreaths? Last summer, she married one of them.

“It was such a ‘meet cute,’” she says. “My friends tell me my life should be a Hallmark movie.” hafsaandco.com  

DIY Floral Design

Granted, you’re probably not planning to erect an elaborate floral installation in your home. But Hafsa Lewis says the principles behind her “big stuff” apply to the simplest arrangements, too.

1. Picking your flowers: “Go with the ones that make you feel something,” she says, “whether it’s a $24 stem or a sad-looking Charlie Brown–type grocery-store flower. If you’re moved enough by something that nature’s created, and it sparks joy inside of you, then you should take it home and make it your own.”

2. Choosing your vessel: “Pick one that allows your flowers space to breathe. If they’re stuck in a vase that just stands them straight up, they can feel stiff. That’s not how they are in nature. They grow loose and wild and free. Let each flower have its moment—it doesn’t matter if it’s the side or the back or the front of the stem. Flowers are beautiful from all angles.”

3. Setting up for success: “First, make sure your vessel is clean. Remove any leaves from the stem that would be under the waterline, since submerged leaves can cause bacteria that will shorten the flowers’ shelf life. Give the stems a fresh cut before you put them in water.”

4. Taking your time: “I often walk away from a piece for a while so that I can come back to it with fresh eyes. And I take pictures in order to get a different perspective. That helps me see what’s missing and what I could do differently. I think that works for both large- and small-scale things.”

5. Honing your skills: Lewis recommends photographing one arrangement you do now and one you do in six months, then studying the pictures to see what you’ve done differently and what has stuck with you. “Did the shape change? Did you pick different colors? Once you start to pay more attention, you learn what you like and what is most meaningful to you.”

The post Flower Power | Nantucket Floral Artist Hafsa Lewis appeared first on New England.

This is so not Elin Hilderbrand weather. For starters, it’s January. The wind chill is in the single digits. Nantucket Sound is riled up. The low cloud cover seems shot through with steel wool. But Hilderbrand, the effervescent, blond, toned, and perpetually tan author of dozens of beachy, best-selling novels set on Massachusetts’s Nantucket Island, where she lives, is gamely cheesing her way through selfie after selfie. It’s day two of the sold-out Elin Hilderbrand Bucket List Weekend, which has brought 150 fans (Hilderbabes, in the parlance) to the island to pal around with the writer during themed banquets, yoga sessions, cooking classes, and, everyone’s favorite, late-night dancing at the Chicken Box, the dive-y bar that makes frequent appearances in Hilderbrand’s novels. On the schedule this morning: a photo op at the white-shingled Brant Point lighthouse—frigid north winds be damned. 

“It’s fine,” Hilderbrand says through a half-frozen smile to the women waiting in line for a picture with her. She’s wearing a driftwood-colored knit beanie, aviator sunglasses, a black puffer jacket, jeans, and damp-at-the-toe sheepskin boots, a getup through which she is somehow projecting sunniness and glamour, though it’s a far cry from the strappy mini-dresses and crystal-embellished sandals she sports for most appearances. “I’ll stay until you guys all have what you want.” 

That’s not entirely true. What they want, what all her fans want, is the promise of a fat Hilderbrand novel to escape into this summer and all the summers to come. They want those familiar book covers with the azure skies over sapphire seas, and the viewed-from-behind women lolling in canvas sling chairs or under umbrellas on golden sand. They want the Mirabels and Mallorys of Hilderbrand’s fictional universe to continue to find second chances at love, reconciliation with estranged family members, and girl-boss empowerment—all while sipping icy gimlets at Galley Beach or slurping mignonette-bathed Pocomo Meadow oysters at CRU. But after 22 years of producing one novel a year—and sometimes two—the 53-year-old queen of the beach read, as she is often called, is throwing in the (plush, cabana-striped Turkish cotton) towel. The book she turns in late in 2023 will be the last of her annual novels. This, despite the fact that she is at peak popularity: Her latest, The Hotel Nantucket, inspired by the grand, 43-room Nantucket Hotel which hosts the Bucket List getaway, debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list. 

“I need to get off the merry-go-round of the expectation that it’s June and Elin Hilderbrand is going to have a new summer book. It’s just too much,” she said later. “I feel great pressure to write a better book every time. I can’t take the stress of having no end in sight.”

She knows that doesn’t please her fans. 

“I think my readers would be more disappointed if I kept going and put out books that didn’t live up to expectations. I’m doing us all a favor by retiring,” she said. “I don’t understand why more writers don’t do it. Honestly. It’s dismounting and nailing the landing and just being, like, I’m done.” 

Little, Brown & Co., Hilderbrand’s publisher, was shocked when she said she wanted to stop.

“I don’t think they believed me. They came to me with a four-book deal. They were offering a lot of money. And of course, in publishing, when that happens, people say, ‘Oh, thank you, thank you, this is so great.’ And I said, ‘I don’t want it.’ They just did not understand.” Eventually, she agreed to deliver three more books, including The Hotel Nantucket.  

“And then I started writing that book and I could not get it right. I wrote six different beginnings. I thought, I’m screwed. I’m blocked. I shouldn’t have signed the contract. I sold my soul to the devil. But I kept at it. I just had to have faith in myself. And then about two-thirds of the way through it, I thought, This book is going to be really good. I say that with so much immodesty. But, I couldn’t believe it! It was such a relief.”

Elin Hilderbrand’s march to beach tote ubiquity started with her childhood in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, where she won the “top author award” in second grade. Her parents divorced, and when her father remarried, the newly blended family began a tradition of spending July in a rented cottage in Brewster, Massachusetts. Those Cape Cod vacations with her four siblings were what she calls classic American summer: beach picnics, mini-golf, outdoor showers, touch football, tidepool explorations, board games, and for Hilderbrand and her step-sister, Heather, walks down a sandy lane to the local bookstore with saved-up allowances in their pockets. The trips came to a sudden end in 1985, when Hilderbrand’s father died in a small-plane crash while returning home from a business trip. She spent her 17th summer assembling Halloween costumes in a factory outside of Philadelphia, grieving both her father and those magical days by the sea. 

“I promised myself then that I would create a life where I spent every summer at the beach,” she said. 

After graduating from Johns Hopkins in 1993 with a degree in creative writing, she took her first trip to Nantucket and was smitten. A year later, she left a teaching job in New York to move to the island year-round.

“Those summers on the Cape were the happiest times of my life, so I think I felt a deep-seated instinct to want to re-create them for myself in a more permanent way. In some ways, my method of healing from my father’s death was to follow in his footsteps.”

In 1996, she married Chip Cunningham, the general manager of the Cliffside Beach Club, a tony gray-shingled hotel and private club on the island’s north shore. Hilderbrand wrote classified ads for the local newspaper while working on a novel set in New York City. (“It was horrible,” she has said.) Still, she was accepted into the prestigious University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate program. 

“My first day I walked in wearing a white sundress and little gold ballet flats. I was very tan and I was, like, ‘Oh, hiii!’ Everyone else was in all black. The boys were in fedoras and the women were in granny shawls. Right out of central casting. 

“I thought, We need to liven this place up, so I taped up a sign that said I was hosting a cocktail party and my classmates were looking at it, like, what is this? Is it free? I said, ‘Yes, it’s a party at my house!’ And I threw a banger. I made all the hors d’oeuvres from Sarah Leah Chase’s Nantucket Open-House Cookbook,” she said with a laugh. “They did not know what to make of me.”  

Neither did her professors. “I got crucified each and every week. My first workshop teacher was Frank Conroy. After we’d all talked about one of my stories, he said, ‘This will never be published. You will never be published.’ I knew he was wrong.”  

Miserable and homesick, Hilderbrand availed herself of the university’s free counseling. “I’d go every week and cry about how much I missed Nantucket. One day the therapist said, ‘You know what you have to do? Start writing a novel about the island.’ So I did.” 

By chance, Michael Carlisle, a literary agent with strong family ties to Nantucket, sat in on her final workshop. He asked which of them lived on the island. “I was in a navy-and-white sarong,” she said. “It was probably very apparent it was me.”    

When she told him after class that she was writing a novel set on Nantucket, he asked her to send it to him when she finished. In January 1999, she mailed him The Beach Club, based loosely on her husband’s workplace. 

“Michael called and said, ‘I love the book, I’d like to represent you, and I’m going to make you lots and lots of money.’ He’s been my agent for 22 years. It’s the longest relationship I’ve sustained in my adult life.” 

Despite Carlisle’s enthusiasm, Hilderbrand’s first five books sold modestly. But a move in 2007 to Little, Brown, which launched a marketing campaign to brand her as the writer of juicy annual beach reads, changed her trajectory. Each book did better than the last. In 2019, with Summer of ’69, she knocked Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens’s blockbuster debut novel, out of the No. 1 spot on the New York Times best-seller list. 

“I’d watched book after book come out and try to bump Crawdads off. And then I did it. It was … overwhelming,” she said, choking up. “I always get teary when I talk about it. I am not Delia Owens. I did not become an instant best-seller. It was my 23rd book.”

While raising her three children, now 22, 20, and 16, Hilderbrand wrote everywhere and anywhere—always in longhand, always on legal pads. She wrote in the stands of her kids’ games, on the ferry, in the school pickup line, at the beach. After she and her husband divorced in 2013, she moved to a small house near the Nantucket Hotel, bought a gym membership there, and wrote by the hotel pool. Her goal was always to piece together three cumulative hours of composing a day. 

“If it took me six or seven hours to do it, I was fine with that,” she said. “I’ve always done the work. It was my job. I’m consistent. That’s not a sexy word. It’s boring. I’m a reliable writer. That’s all I ever wanted to be. To give the readers exactly the same thing completely differently every year.”

“She’s the most disciplined person I have ever met,” said Tim Ehrenberg, marketing director of Nantucket Book Partners, which owns the island’s two bookstores, including Mitchell’s Book Corner, where Hildebrand does always-mobbed weekly appearances in the summer. Ehrenberg orchestrated Hilderbrand’s personalization of 5,000 copies of The Hotel Nantucket pre-ordered through the stores’ website. (The site crashed the day they announced the signed books were available.) “If we were going to meet in the store to sign, she’d text me and say, ‘OK, I can be there at 4:07 but I have to be gone at 4:34 to be somewhere else at 4:39.’ It really was that specific.” 

That rigid schedule, which also included three hours of intense exercise every morning—running, Peloton, and a barre class—was derailed in the spring of 2014 when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She was floored.

“I was healthy and ran 7-8 miles a day, I ate a lot of blueberries,” she wrote in a Huffington Post blog post days after her diagnosis. “I lie awake in the middle of the night … I am scared.”

She decided to go public about her illness. The day after appearing on CBS This Morning to talk about her diagnosis, she underwent a double mastectomy. Twelve days later, with surgical drains still in place, she was back on the road promoting her newest book. More surgeries to deal with a life-threatening infection followed. Through it all, she wrote: in doctors’ waiting rooms and in the hospital. Hilderbrand’s openness about her cancer earned her more fans, some of whom showed up at her events bald from chemo to say her books had helped them get through treatments. Her social media accounts (which she manages herself) became virtual clubhouses for an ever-growing you-go-girl sisterhood. 

It’s Tropical Night at the Nantucket Hotel. Tables in the airy, whitewashed ballroom are set with faux monstera leaves and woven palm-frond placemats. The Bucket List attendees’ bright floral dresses are accessorized with plastic leis. Hilderbrand, in a flouncy, short, mai tai–hued dress and strappy heels, has made her way to a low stage to begin the after-dinner trivia contest. The stakes are high; the winner will appear as a minor character in the author’s next book.

Hilderbrand calls out questions related to her 27-book oeuvre. There is murmuring and head-shaking and laughter. Was it Pickford Crimmins or Hobby Alistair? Madaket or Madequecham? Love O’Donnell or Featherleigh Dale?

“Even I don’t remember all this stuff,” Hilderbrand says. 

Jessica Bailey, an oncology nurse, and Lynnel Ruckert, a political consultant, are sitting at a round table near the center of the room. The two Baton Rouge residents had bonded over their love of Hilderbrand books while spending endless hours in the bleachers of their sons’ baseball games. When they both nabbed coveted spots at the Bucket List weekend—3,400 waitlisted fans were turned away—they began to prepare for this night. 

“We strategized,” Bailey explained later. “We divided all 27 books up and started re-reading them. We took notes—names of characters, where they met, where they worked. Names of lighthouses, restaurants, beaches…”

“Jessica made a spreadsheet,” Ruckert said.

“To see where we were and where we needed to get,” Bailey said. 

When the points were tallied, they had tied for first place. Hilderbrand suggested a runoff, but they declined. 

“We’d already decided that if either of us won, we wanted to use our names together—Bailey Ruckert. Elin likes unusual names, so we thought it was perfect.”

Everyone agreed. It was perfect. 

Elin Hilderbrand and Little, Brown may have popularized the beach read, but they did not invent it. That subset of fiction emerged in the mid-to-late 19th century, with the rise of summer tourism. In grand seaside and mountain hotels, on trains and steamers, the new middle class suddenly had time to read. 

Publishers took note, as author Donna Harrington-Lueker wrote in Books for Idle Hours: Nineteenth Century Publishing and the Rise of Summer Reading, and began pushing “light leisure-time reading that included a mix of escapist sensation fiction, risqué French novels, backlist titles of steady-sellers from established authors, and a new offering—the novel set specifically at the summer resort.”

Cultural critics warned against the dangers of reading such insubstantial fare, especially for young women, whose very virtue, they argued, was threatened by the frothy, overstimulating content.

“I really believe,” said the Reverend T. De Witt Talmage, a prominent New York preacher, in an 1876 sermon, “that there is more pestiferous trash read … in July and August than in all the other 10 months of the year.”

Some 150 years later, “summer read” is still viewed by some as shorthand for inconsequential fluff. But Hilderbrand and her fans say they are not bothered by the label.

“I embrace the beach-read thing,” said Ruckert. “The books don’t need to solve all the world’s problems. Do they show women in a good light and show you how to persevere with family and friends? Yes. They give people hope and distraction and enjoyment.”

Laura Sullivan Davenport, director of employee communications for LinkedIn, who had traveled alone from San Francisco for the Bucket List weekend, found respite in Hilderbrand’s novels, too, especially during the past two years.

“I work so much. I’m on the computer all day and it’s stressful. Her books are light but they’re good. And the way she writes about women, I always find things I can relate to. It’s so good for my mental health to just kind of tune everything else out. That’s what they do.”

Hilderbrand is happy to be a conduit to escape, although she admits beach novels make up only a fraction of the 40 to 45 books she reads a year. “I read very literary fiction. It’s the only way to get better.” 

Hilderbrand, who has designs on becoming a major book influencer—à la actress Reese Witherspoon—in her retirement, recommends mostly female novelists on her Instagram account and through her online book club with Literati, a subscription service that matches readers with celebrity curators. Still, she cites J.D. Salinger, John Updike, and John Cheever as early inspirations.     

“Susan Cheever is a huge fan. She’s told me she sees her father’s influence in my writing. That feels amazing. I don’t get a lot of that kind of credit,” she said. “That’s another thing that makes me want to retire. I don’t want to lose that quality. I just know it’s not forever.”

Hilderbrand doesn’t rule out writing more books—maybe a cookbook or a memoir, maybe even another Nantucket novel someday. But for now, much of her attention is on the several projects she has in development in Hollywood, including the recently greenlit Netflix adaptation of The Perfect Couple, her 2018 whodunit. That six-part series will begin filming this spring. 

“The most important thing to me is that they do Nantucket right,” she said. “I don’t want people who have lived out in ’Sconset for 45 years to come up to me and say, ‘You ruined it.’”

The Bucket List Weekenders are taking their last photos on the hotel front porch. They’ve packed away their “I’d Rather Be Living in an Elin Hilderbrand Novel” tote bags. They’re saying good-bye to new friends. They know they may not see each other again, at least not in real life. Hilderbrand has announced she’ll do only one or two more of these getaways—and of course, there’s that crazy waitlist to contend with.

They’d walked the cobblestone streets Hilderbrand’s characters walked, seen the beaches and (mostly boarded-up) bistros where they’d canoodled. They’d shopped in seasonal boutiques that had reopened one afternoon just for them—such is the power of the author—for the Bucket List “Sip ’n Shop.” And they’d closed—closed!—the Chicken Box with Hilderbrand, then rallied for afternoon beers with her at Cisco Brewers. Many of them hadn’t danced—or drunk—like that in years. Even in bleakest January, they’d fallen hard for Nantucket, or at least Elin Hilderbrand’s version of it. 

“I absolutely loved it,” said Sullivan Davenport after she’d returned home. “I want a house there. Just a cute cottage, you know, it doesn’t have to be on the water. The island has such a romantic feel to it. I’m single. I got divorced a few years ago. Maybe if I had a house on Nantucket, I’d go and meet my future husband and we’d have a lot of money and….”

The plot could only thicken.

“Elin gave me the name of a real estate agent.”  

Weekends with Yankee Bonus!
Watch Elin give co-host Richard Wiese an insider’s look at Nantucket in this season three episode.

The post Elin Hilderbrand: The Queen of Summer…in Winter appeared first on New England.

I’ve lived in the town of 11,500 for nearly 30 years and I still get brought up short by the ephemeral beauty of it all—the campus sugar maples and old elms blazing crimson and yellow, the loosely choreographed college marching band tooting its pregame way across South Main Street, the library bell tower, luminous in the late-day light, chiming out the alma mater—and I’m not even an alum.

Besides nostalgia and a host of college-town cultural perks including world-class museums, film fests, and performers, along with the inevitable good coffee and highbrow Ivy League conversations ripe for eavesdropping, Hanover also offers a perfect base from which to explore the forests and farmland that surround it. You don’t have to go far to find your adventure. The rolling hills of Vermont are just across the Connecticut River to the west, the White Mountains rise to the northeast, and a section of the 2,190-mile, 14-state Appalachian Trail cuts right through the center of town.

Fall Weekend in Hanover, New Hampshire

FRIDAY

Two especially big draws in mid-October are peak foliage and Dartmouth’s Homecoming weekend. Plan well in advance if you want to book a room at one of Hanover’s two in-town hotels. Sitting on a prime corner that’s been occupied by a lodge of some sort since 1780, the handsome brick 108-room Hanover Inn overlooks the Dartmouth Green, the grassy quad that serves as a meeting place for both the college and the community. Six South Street, two blocks away, is a relaxed, contemporary 69-room hotel just steps from shops and restaurants. Both are dog-friendly and offer valet parking.

After you get settled, plan on a pre-dinner stroll past Dartmouth’s Hopkins Center for the Arts, which every September hosts a popular capsule version of the Telluride Film Festival. Next door is the recently renovated Hood Museum, one of the country’s oldest and largest university art collections. (Both were closed during the pandemic; check their websites for ticket and schedule information.)

Make your way up to College Park, where just beyond a white-domed 19th-century observatory a startlingly lifelike bronze sculpture of Robert Frost sits pensively with pen in hand amid tall Norway spruces. (The poet attended Dartmouth in 1892 and was a regular lecturer starting in the 1940s.) Extend the outing if you like by heading northwest across the green to make the one-mile loop around peaceful Occom Pond, rimmed with stately homes.

Plan on dinner tonight at the Hanover Inn’s Pine restaurant, a hit with locals and visitors since it opened in 2013 as part of an extensive redo of the hotel. With its salvaged barn-board cladding, sleek black central fireplace, and stylish lounge seating, Pine manages to be both earthy and sophisticated—not unlike its cocktail and dinner menu.

Start perhaps with a Smoke and Flowers (tequila, mescal, lavender agave, lime, smoked salt) and move on to wild boar and poblano Bolognese or pan-seared hake with truffled corn puree, edamame, and fingerling potatoes.

SATURDAY

In the morning, get in line at Lou’s Restaurant & Bakery, a center-of-town institution since 1947 that is as beloved for its corned beef hash and cruller French toast as its unapologetic, old-school diner vibe—sassy, super-efficient waitresses and all.

After breakfast, browse Still North Books & Bar, a cozy indie bookstore and café opened on a side street in 2019 by Dartmouth grad Allie Levy to help fill the void left by the much-lamented shuttering of the Dartmouth Bookstore.

Back on South Main, stop at Farmhouse Pottery, a natural-light-filled outpost of the noted Woodstock, Vermont–based maker of hand-thrown ceramics; potters are sometimes at the wheel in the in-house studio. Shop Indigo for on-trend apparel, plus cool-weather essentials like Patagonia jackets and Blundstone boots.

Cross the street to the century-old Dartmouth Co-op to pick up college hoodies and vintage-looking letter sweaters. Then head to the Red Kite Candy shop, opened early in 2021 to showcase the handcrafted treats—caramels, toffee, turtles, and sublime French Montélimar-style soft nougat—that founder Elaine McCabe started making as a hobby on her home stove in 2009. Post-pandemic plans include candy-making workshops in the store’s test kitchen.

If you’re traveling with kids, don’t miss the Montshire Museum of Science, in Norwich, Vermont, just across the Connecticut River. The bright, airy interactive museum has indoor and outside exhibits, as well as extensive riverside trails. Norwich is also home to the King Arthur Baking Company, a place of pilgrimage for home bakers who revere the 231-year-old retailer of kitchen equipment and hard-to-find ingredients.

The sprawling post-and-beam flagship store also has a baking school and a café selling pastries, soups, and sandwiches, plus fragrant loaves of just-baked bread. Just to the south on Route 5, the Norwich Farmers Market sets up every Saturday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. through the end of October; spend some time table-hopping for samples of local cheese, yogurt, and charcuterie before deciding what to buy.

Fortified, head 10 miles south on Route 12A past the big-box stores of West Lebanon to rural Plainfield’s Riverview Farm, which sits above a lovely, boulder-strewn stretch of the Connecticut. Walk or ride the horse-drawn wagon to pick apples in the 1,600-tree hillside orchard, or pick raspberries, blueberries, pumpkins, and sunflowers, in season. After you bring in your haul, head for the Mac’s Maple food truck parked most weekends near the cider-making barn to indulge in a maple creemee: rich soft-serve ice cream sweetened with real maple syrup and, if you want to go all out, rolled in dice-size chunks of maple sugar candy.

Back in Hanover, find a bench on South Main Street and enjoy the sidewalk parade of undergrads, alums, academics, and leaf-drunk bus-trippers. You’re also likely to see a handful of scruffy northbound Appalachian Trail through-hikers making their way to the post office to pick up packages and mail; Hanover is the last town they’ll hit on their way to Maine.

For dinner tonight, head to Candela Tapas Lounge, a side-street gem serving Caribbean/Spanish fare—sweet potato tostones, ginger-soy-marinated mahi-mahi tacos, chicken empanadas with spicy guava barbecue sauce, cinnamon-sugar-dusted churros—in an intimate persimmon-colored dining room or on a fairy-lit patio. Hands-on owner Jimmy Van Kirk grew up in Puerto Rico and will happily guide you through his list of aged sipping rums and Spanish reds.

SUNDAY

Get fueled for a day outdoors by picking up a latte at the Dirt Cowboy Café or heading to The Nest, a cheery new café and deli on South Main Street serving inventive egg sandwiches and breakfast burritos, made with locally sourced ingredients. Next, you could rent canoes and kayaks from the Ledyard Canoe Club and spend an hour or two paddling the placid Connecticut. Or you might arrange for hill-busting electric bicycles to be delivered to your hotel by Vermont Bike & Brew, based in Thetford, Vermont. Owner Jonas Cole will make sure you’re comfortable operating the bikes and will help download suggested routes to your phone. (Handlebar mounts keep turn-by-turn instructions in view.)

Maybe, though, you are of the belief that peak foliage is best viewed from above. In that case, make the 40-minute drive east to Cardigan Mountain State Park for a moderate-effort/big-payoff hike. The 1½-mile West Ridge Trail ascends through hardwoods and conifers and delivers you to the broad, exposed-rock summit of 3,155-foot Mount Cardigan. If the day is clear, you’ll be able to see Mount Washington and the rest of the White Mountains’ Presidential Range, plus Vermont’s Camel’s Hump and Maine’s Pleasant Mountain, as well as an astonishing 360 degrees of high-voltage fall colors. Alas, as Robert Frost wrote, “Nothing gold can stay.” Linger awhile, then take a wistful last look before heading back down the trail and starting for home.   

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It’s only 7:20 p.m. in the Old Vines Wine Bar party tent, and already the ladies in the reindeer suits are kicking up their hooves. No matter that every head toss threatens to dislodge their light-up antlers or that each hip swirl tilts red wine close to the lips of the clear plastic cups they’re holding. These women are giving it everything they’ve got—and so is the band, digging in now to “Jingle Bell Rock.” I’m not quite ready to hit the dance floor, but I’m getting there. After all, it’s Christmastime in Kennebunkport. If I’ve learned anything since I arrived, it’s this: When it comes to embracing the holiday season, the good people of this southern Maine seacoast town are fully and unabashedly committed—and they want you to be, too.

I’d only known Kennebunkport, a village of restored 18th- and 19th-century buildings on the tidal Kennebunkport River, as a bustling summer place with stellar eat-in-the-rough lobster shacks and rocky, kayak-worthy coves. But now that its Christmas Prelude, a two-week volunteer-run festival, had put it on America’s don’t-miss list, I set off for a mid-December visit.

I envisioned a weekend sampling the quiet pleasures of an off-season resort: a craft fair, maybe a carol sing, a corner table in a snug seaside bistro. And to be sure, I found those things, but I also found a buoyant, roving block party—part Whoville, part Mardi Gras.

And joyful it was—especially at twilight in Dock Square, the village center, just beyond Minka’s front door. Speakers blared sing-along Christmas standards. Hundreds of people—in snowflake sweaters and elf costumes and head-to-toe tartan—surrounded a giant spruce that was hung with colorful wooden buoys and topped with a cutout lobster, to await its official lighting. No one seemed to mind that a cold drizzle had started to fall or that this was actually the re-lighting of the town tree; cheeky Kennebunkport does it on two consecutive Friday nights during Prelude.

People also love the harborside fireworks that follow the tree lighting. I could have enjoyed them from the Boathouse Waterfront Hotel, my nautical-chic digs for the weekend, just around the corner from Dock Square. I had an airy corner room with two balconies overlooking the river and its marina. But I did one better and booked a spot on a working lobster boat so I could see the display from the water.

I walked across the low bridge that links Kennebunkport to the Lower Village of Kennebunk, and then made my way down a ramp to the Nor’easter, a 42-foot lobster boat helmed by 58-year-old Mike Perkins. His local roots run deep; his ancestors have fished these waters for 200 years. Except for Prelude weekends, when he runs a water taxi service, Captain Mike spends his winters tending lobster traps some 10 miles offshore. In summer, he offers deep-sea fishing outings, charter trips, onboard parties—even ash scatterings at sea.

“As a working fisherman, you have to diversify,” said his first mate and “shore captain,” Shelley Wigglesworth, as she handed out pretzel rods and offered shots of blueberry brandy.

We had a little time before the fireworks began, so we motored into the dark toward the open Atlantic, about a half mile to the south. Mist enveloped us, fuzzing the lights of the sprawling Nonantum Resort, where the annual Fire & Ice party was under way. The fund-raiser, featuring bonfires, music, and ice sculptures (including an ice luge that sends perfectly chilled martinis down its chute), sold out its 3,000 tickets in 28 minutes.

I looked down into the ink-dark water, eddied with a falling tide, and saw in that maelstrom a kind of portal into Kennebunkport’s storied past. In the 1600s, the first European settlers built sawmills on this river. By the late 18th century, that timber had helped transform the town into a major shipbuilding center—and made local schooner captains and traders rich. In 1872, a group of Boston businessmen purchased five miles of rocky coastline just east of the mouth of the river and called it Cape Arundel. Grand hotels and summer “cottages” went up. Among the new homes was one built by George H. Walker; his rambling shingle-style mansion on a wave-lashed promontory would become known as the Summer White House after Walker’s namesake grandson, George H.W. Bush, took office in 1989. (Members of the Bush family still spend time there and have been known to show up at Prelude events.) The arrival of rail service brought city dwellers north to take in the restorative salt air and to race canoes on the river, the popular activity of the day. Native tribe members made and sold birch-bark and canvas canoes from workshops on the banks of the river into the early 20th century.

Captain Mike swung the boat around and headed back toward town. I asked him if it was tough to fish all winter. “If you put on the right clothes, it’s OK,” he said. Later he added, somewhat cryptically, “A good day of fishing is coming home on the same boat you left on.”

Musette opened in 2017, after Jonathan Cartwright, the executive chef at Kennebunk’s posh White Barn Inn, took over the Wayfarer Restaurant, an unfussy institution for nearly 60 years. Regulars fretted that the celebrated fine-dining chef would transform their beloved hangout. But they needn’t have worried: The stools and lunch counter are still there, as are the pale wood shiplap walls and the blue cushioned banquettes. Even local legend and longtime hostess Bert Austin, known for her saucy good humor—and fried-egg earrings—stayed on. It was important to Selena Gearinger, the warm 31-year-old whom Cartwright picked to be head chef, that locals felt welcome.

“When Prelude is done, locals are all we have,” she said when she stopped by my table as I was polishing off my eggs Benedict with Musette’s signature corned beef hash. “But I do love this time of year—the outfits and the crazy hats. And everyone is so positive. It’s people who just want to be together. We get big families who come every year, and they make reservations for next year while they are here. I think my favorite thing is that after the carol sing at the church up the road, people stroll down for cookies and hot chocolate—and they keep singing.”

I walked past that 163-year-old white church and crossed the street to Farm + Table, a gift shop set in a freshly painted red barn. Inside, I found owners Bruce and Liz Andrews, busily restocking shelves. The couple had vacationed in Kennebunkport for 25 years when they spotted the old barn in 2013, and knew it was the space they’d been seeking for a long-dreamed-of shop.

Bruce knows how much effort goes into Prelude. He is a member of the Kennebunkport Business Association, the group that puts on the festival every year and marshals hundreds of volunteers to deck the town with greenery, red bows, and twinkle lights.

“Christmas Prelude started 37 years ago as a way for businesses to give back to locals, and it grew into this giant monster,” he said with a laugh. “When we first opened, we were told, ‘Be ready for Prelude weekends. You’re going to need a doorman.’ We were shocked when we had a line of people waiting to come in. I saw locals in the line and said, ‘What are you doing here? You can come anytime!’ But they wanted to experience it.”

The caramels were gone by the time I pulled into the Adams Family Christmas Tree Farm on a rural stretch of road about a mile from Dock Square. Wayne Adams ambled out of a daffodil-yellow farmhouse to greet me.

“It was a hobby that got out of control,” the 78-year-old told me as we surveyed the crop of fir trees he started planting 11 years ago on land that has been in his family for generations. “I’m a lawyer, but this allows me to say I live on a working farm. There are only two in Kennebunkport.”

I asked him how he learned the business.

“I joined the Maine Christmas Tree Association. They are real Mainers. They didn’t talk to me for three years,” he said, keeping a straight face. “I understand. I’m a Mainer.”

Back in town, I headed out for more shopping. In Daytrip Society, on Dock Square, I spotted Sara Fitz recycled-sail bags adorned with local watercolorist Sara Fitzgerald O’Brien’s charming renditions of lobsters, hydrangeas, and Breton striped shirts. In Spaces, a beachy home decor shop in the Lower Village, I fell in love with bottle-brush trees in shades of tangerine, melon, and coral. As I made my purchase, I discovered that the woman behind the counter was Cheryll Pendergast—also known in these parts as Mrs. Claus.

“I ride in the lobster boat with Santa when he arrives during Prelude with two of Santa’s helpers, who are dressed in lobster costumes,” she said. “It’s amazing. We come down the river, and there are so many people on the bridge, cheering and yelling. It’s like Santa is a rock star.”

I told her I was sorry I missed that.

“I’ve done it for 20 years, and I’ve been through five Santas,” she said, adding, “No one else will put on that dress in the middle of winter.”

I laughed with her, but I got the feeling she wouldn’t hand over the red dress even if another volunteer came forward.

See More: Guide to Kennebunkport, Maine | Eat, Stay, Shop & Play

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Spectators along the Dartmouth Skiway’s steepest trail have cinched up their hoods or turned their backs to the bitter wind as they wait for the race to start. Volunteer course workers are struggling to keep the giant slalom gates upright. Funnels of snow spiral across the slope just as the first forerunner appears at the crest of the final pitch. Instantly, I feel my pulse spike, which makes no sense at all, because I’m just a bystander at this children’s ski race—a qualifier for the New Hampshire state championships for 10-to-13-year-olds.

The competition gets under way, and one after another, girls in colorful ski suits whiz by, some in aerodynamic tucks, some in decidedly less streamlined positions. Parents and siblings shout encouragement; some are ringing cowbells, World Cup–style.

“What number are they on?” a woman near me asks. After she gets an answer from her companion, I hear her say, “I feel like I’m going to throw up.”

I have to smile. I remember that feeling. More than a decade ago, I was a ski racing mom with a pounding heart and a crumpled start list in my gloved hand, standing with no doubt equally overwrought parents in the cold and blowing snow. We’d tuned the skis, risen at dawn, checked the forecast, packed the lunches, lugged the gear, found the lost goggles, activated the hand warmers, offered the Kleenex, tightened the helmets, then—in whiteouts and in polar vortexes—we’d skied or hiked or snowshoed to the sidelines to wait for that singularly agonizing moment when our child was about to push out of a starting gate and point his or her skis downhill. Sure, we’d signed our kids up for the local ski club so they would have fun, make friends, and learn a lifetime sport. We loved skiing and hoped they would too. And we all assured each other that the results didn’t matter—even as we silently entreated the stopwatch gods to grant our sons or daughters a top 10 finish or, if that was too much to ask, at least please not let them fall. I mean, we got it: These were weekend races in small-town New Hampshire. It wasn’t like any of these kids were going to the Olympics.

Except, hold on a second. Maybe one of them was.

Back in 2003, when my daughter Claudia was 8 years old, a new girl joined her group on the Ford Sayre ski team. At the time, I was a co-director of the volunteer-run ski racing program, which was an outgrowth of a community ski school started in Hanover, New Hampshire, in the 1930s by Dartmouth alum Ford K. Sayre. My job entailed, among other things, going to monthly board meetings and handling sign-ups. This new registrant, who had moved to rural Lyme, New Hampshire, from Vail, Colorado, had a sweet smile, a thick braid, and a snazzy red and black ski jacket. She also had a mother (a Western Massachusetts native and champion on the over-30 masters ski race circuit, we heard) who acted as her unofficial coach, shadowing her on the snow during the team’s five-times-a-week practices. The mother was at her side on weekends at the Dartmouth Skiway, the club’s home hill in Lyme, which had challenging-enough terrain to have hosted the 2003 NCAA Skiing Championships, and on weekdays at the after-school sessions held at mom-and-pop Whaleback Mountain, set along Interstate 89 in Enfield, or tiny Storrs Hill, on the edge of downtown Lebanon, which had one single-rider Poma lift.

No matter the venue, when it came to skiing this new girl was all business. When other kids were clowning around in the terrain park, she was analyzing turn apexes. When other kids were sliding on cafeteria trays on a slope near the base lodge, she was rehearsing pole plants. When other kids were chomping through boxes of pre-race Milk Duds, she was calmly preparing to eat their lunch on the slalom or giant slalom course. Which she did. Every single time.

She was a lovely girl, as I recall—polite and humble and friendly. She didn’t set herself apart, but she was most definitely apart.

Her name was Mikaela Shiffrin.

In just nine years, she would win her first World Cup race—and be on her way to becoming one of the best ski racers in the world. Her accomplishments in this most capricious of sports, where mere fractions of a second can separate the top finishers, are astonishing. Last winter, at the age of 24, she won a record 17 World Cup races, bringing her total number of career victories to 60. She also became the first skier—male or female—to win the World Cup overall, slalom, giant slalom, and super-G titles in a single season. Not only that, but in 2019 she earned her fourth consecutive World Championship gold in slalom. And, oh yes, in her two Olympic appearances (2014 and 2018) she won two gold medals and a silver. A phenom, a prodigy, a once-in-a-generation talent, the best ever—she has been called all of these things. That she was in our midst for a few years before her family moved on was both thrilling and confounding.

“Without a doubt, Mikaela was the most polished 8-year-old I had ever seen,” said Mark Schiffman, who has coached for Ford Sayre on and off since 1988 and had Shiffrin in his training group. “She looked like a mini World Cup racer. And she was deceptively fast. Her skiing was so smooth, it was not immediately obvious how much faster she was than other kids.”

She didn’t just beat my daughter and all the other girls in her age group; her times were often significantly better than those of boys who were bigger, stronger—and several years older.

“It was so impressive, the way she stood on her outside ski. She was so well balanced,” said veteran Ford Sayre coach Matt Purcell, recalling the first time he saw Mikaela. “She was doing things as an 8-year-old that most kids didn’t start to learn until years later. That came from a lot of hours on snow.”

Naomi Tomky, now living in Seattle, was a college sophomore who had just quit the Dartmouth ski team when she was asked to help out as a part-time coach for the Ford Sayre team.

“My first day on the hill, I watched Mikaela, and I said, ‘Holy crap, she is awesome!’” Tomky remembered. “I had no framework for this—I’d just started coaching—but I remember thinking that if no one screws this up, she will be a world-class racer. And I felt pressure not to be the one to screw it up.”

It wasn’t Mikaela’s technique alone that impressed the coaches. It was also her sunny attitude, her focus, and her commitment to hard work. Beyond that—and perhaps most baffling to those of us who had learned that a parent’s optimal level of on-mountain involvement was to be the person at the bottom with the snacks—Mikaela didn’t just tolerate the near-constant input from her mother, Eileen, but seemed to welcome it and thrive on it.

“Instead of getting fed up and turned off, Mikaela listened and did what her mother asked her to do,” said Mike Holland, a two-time Olympian in ski jumping, a parent to three racers, and a coach in the Ford Sayre kids’ jumping program. “That approach typically doesn’t work. I’ve seen many pushy parents [over the years]. The motivation needs to come from the kid. You can’t maintain it without a passion for it.”

Purcell recalled that after the day’s program ended at 1 p.m., Mikaela would be back out with Eileen at 1:30, doing more laps and drills. “The bottom line was that Mikaela wanted to be out there. She had that inborn passion. And her parents instilled an incredible work ethic in her.” 

Sometimes I spotted Mikaela and her mother on the trail below as I rode the Skiway quad chairlift with other parents. Eileen might be demonstrating hand positions or pointing down the fall line or following closely behind her daughter shouting instructions. Helicopter mom. Too much. Over the top. I’m sure we said those things. But there was awe, too, and the sense that we might be witnessing something much bigger than our homegrown club, something so lightning-in-a-bottle special that conventional wisdom was off the table. We all felt it—the kids, the parents, the coaches, and, I think it’s safe to say, Eileen herself. I remember her sitting on the edge of a table in the base lodge one day, telling me about a conversation she’d had with Mikaela. They’d been driving home from the Skiway, and Mikaela, who was in the back seat, had asked when the next race was. As I recall it, Eileen said that when she told her, Mikaela said she couldn’t wait to have that feeling again—of pushing out of the gate and flying down the course. And she had said it with such unexpected intensity, such ardor, that Eileen had studied her in the rear-view mirror and wondered just what she had on her hands.

Long after Mikaela left us and rose to prominence, we learned through profiles in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Sports Illustrated, among others, that the Shiffrins’ unconventional, hands-on approach had extended well beyond the slopes. Eileen and her husband, Jeff, an anesthesiologist and former member of the Dartmouth ski team, were voracious consumers of videos, books, and articles about ski racing technique. They subscribed to the theory that 10,000 hours of deliberate practice was required to master anything, and so they looked for ways for Mikaela to log skills-building time. Balance was deemed crucial, so the Shiffrins bought a unicycle. Coordination and focus were vital, so Mikaela was encouraged to practice juggling. (She was occasionally spotted on the streets of Lyme juggling while riding a unicycle.) Mikaela and her brother, Taylor, who also skied on the Ford Sayre team and went on to race for the University of Denver, simulated skiing on in-line skates and made slalom turns around broomsticks. Chores such as rebuilding the front lawn, as the family did one summer, weren’t just a matter of pitching in; they also developed upper-body strength. Every activity was another stone laid on the path toward what the Shiffrins said was the goal: not to make the podium, but to make the perfect turn.

By all accounts, Mikaela had been a gung-ho participant, embracing challenges, soaking up information—and clamoring for more. Beyond supreme talent, she seemed to have “a rage to master,” a trait identified by Boston College psychology professor Ellen Winner as one of the defining characteristics of highly gifted children. That she also had parents eager and equipped to be the bellows to her fire made Mikaela a prime candidate to grow into the world-beater she became.

—

Eileen’s role as a de facto coach to Mikaela and several other girls who had started trailing along with the duo rankled Ford Sayre coaches. Parents weren’t supposed to be on the hill with their kids during practice—we all knew that—and they sure weren’t supposed to be offering advice. Hoping to bring Eileen into the fold, the team asked her to become an official coach.

“I remember being shocked that they brought her on as a coach,” said Tomky, “because it was the opposite of how things worked on the teams I had been on as a racer—a parent overstepping their bounds would have been banned from the hill, not invited on board. I recall thinking it probably had to do with it being a very small town; everybody would still have to run into each other at the grocery store.”

No one questioned Eileen’s coaching skills. She had a keen eye for what kids needed to work on. She could be generous with her time with racers who were serious about improving—and she was excellent at conveying advice. (She even taught my daughter, who got a little banged up in a fall, how to swallow ibuprofen—something I’d failed at for years.)

“She is probably one of the best coaches you’ll ever meet,” Purcell said. “And she did bring good things to Ford Sayre.”

Her strong opinions, however, often ran counter to traditional coaching protocol. She believed, for instance, that even young racers should learn how to use their forearms and shins to bang slalom gates out of the way, an advanced technique that coaches generally didn’t introduce until later. She kept Mikaela and her small training group doing drills when free-skiing was encouraged. It wasn’t long before a rift developed in the parent ranks. Some saw Mikaela’s results and questioned why all of the coaches—including head coach Tiger Shaw, a two-time Olympian, nine-time U.S. national champion, and parent of three Ford Sayre racers—weren’t doing what Eileen was doing. (In 2014, the year Mikaela won her first Olympic gold, Shaw moved to Park City, Utah, to become CEO and president of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association, the governing body for the U.S. Ski Team—a head-spinning convergence of Ford Sayre alumni.)

Seeking even more training time for Mikaela, the Shiffrins joined a second team, the Lebanon Outing Club, based out of Storrs Hill, which offered night skiing and was so small that skiers could get in more than two dozen runs in a single practice session. A handful of Ford Sayre families followed them there. They wanted some of Mikaela’s magic dust, even if all they got to do in the end was eat it. That caused more turmoil on our team; you weren’t supposed to ski with two clubs at once.

At our monthly board meetings, we wrung our hands over the Shiffrin situation. I don’t remember the details of the discussions, but I do remember leaving a few of the gatherings in tears. I was a volunteer, a mom, a maker of snacks; I wanted no part of this drama. Eventually, Eileen was relieved of her Ford Sayre coaching duties, and the Shiffrins switched their affiliation to the Lebanon Outing Club. By the winter of 2007, they had left the area—first moving to Burke, Vermont, then back to Vail, then returning to Burke when Mikaela was old enough to enroll in the Burke Mountain Academy, a small boarding school for elite ski racers. In some interviews about their years in New Hampshire, the Shiffrins don’t mention Ford Sayre at all.

“I hope Mikaela remembers us,” Purcell told me. “I hope she appreciates the work that all of us put in. I’m sure she does.”

Ford Sayre certainly remembers her.

“All the kids idolize her,” Purcell added. “And she’s a great role model for them. You don’t see temper tantrums if she doesn’t win. She doesn’t throw stuff. I say, ‘She was a great kid with a big smile on her face, just like you guys.’ And I tell them, ‘If you want to get better, you have to be very dedicated.’”

I asked him if any current members of the Ford Sayre team show Mikaela-like potential.

“We have a couple who are on the fringe, and if they keep on the right track…” he said. “But it’s a long road and things change. It’s such a tough sport. It takes a lot of things going the right way. You cannot replicate how Mikaela became Mikaela.”

—

Under the high beamed ceilings of the Dartmouth Skiway base lodge, families have gathered to wait for the announcement of the race results. I’ve settled at a table near a group of preteen girls, their faces flushed with windburn, who have strewn the table with jackets and helmets and gloves. Some are dipping French fries into plastic containers of ketchup; some are popping Skittles. A few are looking at phones. I ask them who their favorite racer is and they look up, all smiles.

“Mikaela!”

“One of my daughters was in her age group when she skied for Ford Sayre,” I say.

“Whoa,” they say.

“What have you heard about her?” I ask.

“On a powder day, most kids would go ski in the woods, but she would set a course and train,” one girl volunteers.

“She stayed after practice to do drills until she got it right, and even when she got it right, she’d keep skiing.”

“She would train, eat mac and cheese, train, go home, and then go train more.”

“The coaches always have us write our goals down for the year, and when Mikaela did hers, she said she wanted to win a World Cup race.”

“It’s kind of cool to know you can actually get that far from here.”

“Super-far,” another girl says. They all nod.

I finish my hot chocolate and look around the crowded lodge, remembering these long afternoons. It always took forever for results to be announced. We wanted to get going. We were tired. It would be getting dark soon. We had to let the dog out. I don’t miss all the waiting around. But I do miss the camaraderie of the other parents, we anxious sideline boosters who were bonded by the million things it took to get our kids to a ski race and by the pleasure of seeing our sons and daughters grow to love skiing as much as we did. I also, perhaps surprisingly, miss those drives home from the Skiway, from Sunapee, from Ragged, from Gunstock. On serpentine back roads, under a twilit sky streaked purple and mauve, my husband and my daughters and I talked—not about who had won (duh, Mikaela), but about friends and school and life. In the end, being the fastest wasn’t the point—not for my kids, not for most kids.

Still, when I see Mikaela Shiffrin on television sliding into a World Cup starting gate, goggles down, breathing deeply and deliberately, staring down the racecourse in the wind or fog or swirling snow, my heart rate soars. 

—

Where Olympians Are Made

Mikaela Shiffrin is not the first Olympian to have roots with the Ford Sayre Ski Council. The organization, which offers kids Alpine, cross-country, freestyle, and ski jumping programs, as well as an intensive “academy” for highly committed high schoolers, has sent more than a dozen athletes to the Winter Games since its inception in 1950.

The council was formed to carry on the work started by Ford K. Sayre and his wife, Peggy, who were the managers of the landmark Hanover Inn in the 1930s. Ford had fallen in love with skiing while attending Dartmouth (as a senior in 1933, he’d directed the school’s famed Winter Carnival) and believed every child should have the chance to learn the sport.

The Sayres gathered and refurbished used equipment and gave free ski lessons to area children. In the gentle hills of Hanover and neighboring Norwich, Vermont, boys and girls trudged up beginner slopes, their breath visible in the sharp cold, and made their first joyful descents. With progress, students could graduate to Oak Hill in Hanover, where the country’s first J-bar lift was installed in 1935.

Ford joined the Army Air Corps in 1942. Two years later, at the age of 34, he died in a midair collision during an air show in Spokane, Washington. In his honor, friends raised money to keep the Sayres’ ski school going. By 1956, the program had not only introduced hundreds of local children to skiing and ski jumping but also produced its first Olympians (and Sports Illustrated cover subjects) in Ralph Miller of Hanover and Betsy Snite of Norwich. Snite went on to win the Olympic silver medal in slalom in 1960 at Squaw Valley, California.

The Hanover region’s deep affinity for winter sports, coupled with accessible venues that allowed kids to ski and jump after school—not just on weekends, as with most ski teams at bigger ski resorts—created a perfect incubator for budding champs. At the same time, elite athletes—some homegrown, some products of Dartmouth (which itself has sent more than 100 athletes to the Olympics)—who settled in the area supplied a deep gene pool of talent. Many of those local stars enrolled their own children in Ford Sayre programs and often volunteered to coach.

Among the Ford Sayre alums who have competed in the Olympics are Walter Malmquist (1976; Nordic combined), Jeff Hastings (1984; ski jumping), Mike Holland (1984, 1988; ski jumping), Dorcas DenHartog-Wonsavage (1988, 1992, 1994; Nordic skiing), Joe Holland (1988, 1992; Nordic combined), Felix McGrath (1988; Alpine), Jim Holland (1992, 1994; ski jumping), Liz McIntyre (1992, 1994 [silver], 1998; moguls), Tim Tetreault (1992, 1994, 1998; Nordic combined), Hannah Kearney (2006, 2010 [gold], 2014 [bronze]; moguls), and Paddy Caldwell (2018; Nordic skiing).

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I am working my way through a bowl of clam chowder under the low, age-darkened beams of the White Horse Tavern. I have shopping bags at my feet, my Christmas list on the table. A fire warms the room. Every stool at the bar is taken. I’m tempted to linger in this snug, nearly 350-year-old pub, and to mark my last day here in Newport, Rhode Island, with a Dark ’n’ Stormy as a nod to the town’s rum-running roots. But that would make me late for an afternoon screening of It’s a Wonderful Life. And the fact is I’m already way overdue; I’ve never seen the classic holiday film.

Wind sweeps up from the harbor and rattles the boughs of bare elms as I cross Washington Square, the trapezoidal centerpiece of downtown Newport, to the Jane Pickens Theater. The restored Greek Revival movie house, built as a church in 1834 and converted into a theater in the silent-film era, has a vintage marquee, an old-school glassed-in ticket booth, and—what’s this?—a cocktail bar behind the lobby candy counter. I bring a drink into the packed house, find a seat, and wait for the lights to dim.

—

I’d spent a mid-December weekend bouncing around this historic seaport town so deeply associated with summer pleasures—boats, beaches, opulent oceanfront “cottages”—and discovered that it throws itself into the holiday season with equal gusto. The monthlong Christmas in Newport festival, produced by more than 1,500 volunteers, jams the calendar with tours, concerts, craft fairs, and other events that are either free or raise money for local charities. Since its inception in 1971, organizers have also created, to great effect, a kind of dress code for the community by asking that only clear bulbs be used in holiday displays. When those lights come on in the blue-violet twilight, outlining everything from windowpanes to wharf posts, Newport feels twinkly and enchanted—like one of those ceramic tabletop holiday villages come to life.

I felt that magic as I walked on Bannister’s and Bowen’s wharves, where chowder houses, bars, shops, and galleries—all aglow, all busy—occupy what were once colonial-era chandleries and sail lofts. And I felt it when I left that bustle behind and went alone to the end of a long dock where a single lit tree sent its simple good tidings out across the harbor chop.

—

I’d missed the season-opening illuminated boat parade and the roving retail block party that is the Holiday Stroll, but I’d checked in at the Francis Malbone House—a cream-colored brick mansion built in 1760 for a wealthy shipping merchant on harbor-hugging Thames Street—just in time to hear the results of the townwide doorway decoration contest.

“We won,” said Will Dewey, the inn’s soft-spoken owner, as he helped me bring my bags through a front entrance framed with long-needle pine garlands and berry-and-cone-garnished swag. “Just found out. The grand prize.” 

The interiors seemed equally award-worthy. In the elegant, wainscoted parlors off the broad central hall, Dewey and his staff had decked the mantels, tables, and sills with umbrella pine boughs, gilded magnolia leaves, poinsettias, wrapped boxes, candles, and fruit-studded miniature trees. Afternoon tea was under way in one of the common rooms. The spread—chicken velouté, grilled pizza, artichoke crab dip, cheddar scones, maple chocolate chip Bundt cake, Linzer cookies, apricot biscotti, and more—covered a large dining table.

“I tell guests to make late dinner reservations,” Dewey said with a laugh when I commented on the abundance of food. “I think some people don’t go out to dinner at all.”

I would have filled a plate and parked myself in a wing chair by one of the blazing fireplaces, but I’d made plans to join a group walking tour that was setting off soon from the Museum of Newport History at the foot of Washington Square.

In the chilly dusk, I followed our guide, Pat—petite, gray-haired, toting a lantern—away from the town center and down narrow streets lined with wreath-hung gas lamps and antique clapboard houses. On the corner of Farewell and Marlborough, we paused. On one side was the gambrel-roofed White Horse Tavern, dating back to 1673; on the other, the expansive, austere Great Friends Meeting House, built in 1699. The air smelled of wood smoke. Overhead, black birds swirled in fluid murmurations. A church bell began tolling the hour. For a moment, centuries dropped away.

Christmas came and went with little acknowledgment in those days, Pat said. Throughout New England, early settlers rejected the carousing and high jinks (what influential Puritan ministers of the day decried as “mad mirth”) that had been standard yuletide behavior back in England. For a time, Christmas was even outlawed.

It wasn’t until the 19th century that the holiday gained widespread acceptance and morphed into a season associated less with debauchery and more with domesticity, gift-giving, and goodwill. That attitude shift, it turns out, was thanks in part to a seasonal resident of Newport, Clement Clarke Moore. Moore was a New York City classics professor when he wrote “A Visit from Saint Nicholas,” also known as “The Night Before Christmas,” in 1822 for his children. By 1850, when he began spending summers in a rambling Victorian house on Newport’s Catherine Street, his widely published poem had become the national blueprint for a happy, and Santa-centric, Christmas.

After the tour, I headed back toward the harbor. In the hopping Midtown Oyster Bar, over a platter of local oysters—briny Dutchies, buttery Sakonnets, and creamy Sea Cups—and a pint of Rhode Island–brewed Whalers Rise pale ale, I studied my Christmas in Newport calendar and plotted my next days. There would be visits to the famed Gilded Age mansions, for sure, and perhaps a stroll on the 3½-mile seaside Cliff Walk. And there would most certainly be shopping.

In the morning, I drove down Bellevue Avenue, where turn-of-the-20th-century tycoons with now-familiar names like Vanderbilt, Astor, and Morgan built grand summer palaces and filled them with precious art and furnishings. Three of the most lavish estates are museums that stay open year-round: the Elms, modeled after a mid-18th-century French château; Marble House, inspired by the Petit Trianon at Versailles; and the Breakers, Cornelius Vanderbilt II’s gonzo 70-room Italian Renaissance palazzo. At Christmastime, hundreds of volunteers pitch in to deck them out for the holidays.

I spent the day drifting up grand marble stairways and in and out of gold boudoirs and crimson parlors, listening to audio tours that spilled tales of extravagance and bad behavior. The trimmed trees, set banquet tables, and draped mantels perfectly matched the mood and style of each room—as if Martha Stewart and Marie Antoinette had co-captained the fantasy league decorating team. And it was pure fantasy; the mansions’ owners never actually spent Christmas there.  

I found a more historically accurate view of what Christmas was like for Newport’s elite at Rough Point, the summer home of heiress, art collector, and philanthropist Doris Duke. Though a few of the rooms in the sprawling, waterfront English manor house had been spruced up for the holidays, most were shown as they were when Duke was traveling: shrouded in ghostly white dust covers, awaiting her return. I lingered in the airy, ocean-view solarium, imagining Duke gazing out at the moody surf and her two beloved pet Bactrian camels, Princess and Baby, who roamed the grounds from 1988 to 1992. (It’s said she brought the camels, now immortalized in two life-sized topiaries on the front lawn, into the solarium to ride out a hurricane.) Duke’s eccentricities—she pursued belly dancing, longboard surfing, and gospel singing—were legendary, but she was also a generous and passionate preservationist. In 1968, she started the Newport Restoration Foundation, which in the past five decades has invested in and restored more than 70 early-American houses in town.

Though it was starting to rain and the wind had picked up, I decided to set off on the Cliff Walk. I was dressed for the weather and figured I’d brave it for a mile, maybe two. And how nice to have the famed coastal footpath and those extraordinary ocean and mansion views to myself. After 10 minutes, the showers had become a deluge; the wind, a bitter, head-turning gale. I turned back. Some things, I had to admit as I dove for the shelter of my car, were best left for pleasant days—and walking by the sea was one of them.           

After a day of rococo and drama, I was ready for a glass of wine and the clean lines of TSK (Thames Street Kitchen), a downtown restaurant that reopened in the summer of 2018 after a three-year hiatus. With its concrete tables, modern leather chairs, and hip-hop soundtrack, TSK is the antithesis of Vanderbiltian overkill. That was by design, according to Julia Jenkins-Hoffer, a fifth-generation Newporter who owns the restaurant (and two other casual eateries) with her twin sister, Anna, and their chef husbands, Chad Hoffer and Tyler Burnley, all in their 30s.

“A lot of people think Newport is this stuffy town, with all this wealth. There is some of that, but that’s not who we are, and it’s not who most of the people who live here are,” Jenkins-Hoffer told me. “We wanted to give off a fun, cool vibe—while offering food that is refined.”

It’s a mash-up that works. My dinner was terrific, from the single, doorknob-size raviolo topped with bits of serrano ham and filled with ricotta and a runny egg, to the duck breast with cocoa nibs and pear puree, to the hazelnut tuile cookie topped with a swirl of sweet potato mousse.

In the morning, I put my folded gift list into my pocket and headed to the shops along the wharves and beyond. I considered a sea urchin–shaped platter in the Newport Mansions Store, nautical cord bracelets in Kiel James Patrick, a Breton striped sweater in Monelle. Maybe I would come back for those later. I was humming carols by the time I committed to wooden cocktail muddlers and locally harvested sea salt at the Museum of Newport History gift shop, and dark chocolate lobsters in the Newport Sweet Shoppe. In Farmaesthetics, a serene organic skin-care boutique, I pondered an orange-and-clove-scented scrub called Hot Toddy for the Body, and in Kristen Coates, an eclectic gallery and home decor shop, I waffled between mini versions of Grace Windsor’s striking oyster shell paintings and Ashley Provencher’s vibrant linear seascapes.

Coates herself was behind the counter of her namesake store, which she opened in her hometown after returning from stints in the fashion and art worlds in Los Angeles and New York. In 2016, she cofounded the Holiday Stroll to promote local shopping—and to help get the word out that Newport is a town for all seasons.

“This is absolutely my favorite time of year here,” Coates said. “It’s so festive and has this old-timey feeling. I think people come here and say, ‘This is it. This is the quintessential New England town, and I have to be here at Christmas.’”

I had to agree.

I hoisted my shopping bags. I wanted to see the inside of the old White Horse Tavern and I was ready for lunch. As I passed the Jane Pickens Theater, I noticed It’s a Wonderful Life was showing later that day. I knew how my visit would end.

—

The credits roll. The house lights come up. Clarence has earned his angel wings; human kindness has prevailed. I move with the happy, teary crowd to the theater exit, half expecting to see film-set snowflakes, fat as cotton balls, falling from the sky. Instead, a weighty mist scented with brine and balsam has settled on the town. I take the long way back, poking around in a few more shops, reading posted menus and historical markers, smiling at a group of women who come out of a bar singing jubilantly off-key.

I cut down one quiet cobbled lane, then another. From somewhere on the water’s edge, a foghorn is sounding its low trumpet. It’s dark by the time I get back to the inn, and up and down Thames Street the damp air, like an impressionist’s deft brush, has created coronas around each street lamp, as ethereal and as lovely as halos.

Holiday Events in Newport, Rhode Island

Holiday Lantern Tours Nov. 22–Dec. 28 The savvy guides of the Newport Historical Society light the way during this stroll through Newport’s Christmas past. Offered Friday and Saturday afternoons. 401-841-8770; newporthistorytours.org

Christmas at the Newport Mansions Nov. 23–Jan. 1 Like grand dames dripping with jewels, three famed Newport mansions—the Breakers, the Elms, and Marble House—are dressed to dazzle in 30 Christmas trees and a constellation of ornaments. 401-847-1000; newportmansions.org

The Newport Nutcracker Nov. 27, 29, and 30; Dec. 1 and 3–6 This nearly two-decade local tradition immerses ballet fans in the story of Clara and her Nutcracker Prince as it unfolds throughout the historic Rosecliff mansion. 401-847-4470; islandmovingco.org

Bowen’s Wharf Holiday Block Party and Boat Parade Nov. 29 The waterfront becomes a winter wonderland filled with live music, special deals at local shops, and boats glittering with lights from stem to stern. bowenswharf.com/events

Christmas in Newport Dec. 1–31 From concerts and craft fairs to New England’s largest gingerbread lighthouse, it’s nonstop merrymaking all month long with a slate of 70-plus holiday activities that are free or benefit a charity. christmasinnewport.org

Bowen’s Wharf Tree Lighting Dec. 7 Frosty the Snowman and a Christmas carol sing-along set the stage for Mayor Jamie Bova’s lighting the wharf’s 30-foot tree, immediately followed by the arrival of Santa and Mrs. Claus by boat. bowenswharf.com/events

SEE MORE: Holiday Celebrations in Coastal Rhode Island 5 Favorite New England Christmas Cities

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Town and gown are agreeably blurred in Hanover, New Hampshire, home to Dartmouth College, the Ivy League’s smallest and most rural school. Main Street, with its awning-shaded brick storefronts, flows seamlessly from the central campus green. Sidewalks are busy with kids in “D” sweatshirts, mothers pushing strollers and retirees walking dogs. In winter, Occom Pond is shared by grad students playing pick-up hockey and toddlers wobbling on double-blades, and in spring, the Connecticut River is creased by Big Green rowing shells and family motor boats. This intermingling reaches its convivial zenith at Lou’s Restaurant and Bakery, a breakfast-all-day joint that has for decades pulled off the neat trick of allowing locals and students to think of it as their very own.

After Lou Bressett, a Hanover native and decorated U.S. Marine, opened Lou’s in 1947, it quickly became an essential gathering place for professors, coaches, businesspeople, and hung-over frat boys. (Dartmouth didn’t start admitting women until 1972.) Lou sold it in 1979 to Bob Watson, most remembered, alas, for removing the black and white photos of Lou’s regulars from the walls. When current owners, Toby and Pattie Fried, bought the place in 1992, they won over skeptics with their commitment to the quality of the food. They got points, too, for honoring customers’ wishes and re-hanging a gallery of restaurant denizens behind the soda fountain counter.

The Frieds also expanded the bakery offerings to showcase Toby’s pastry-making skills, acquired in his native Vienna and honed at Boston’s Ritz-Carlton.

“We made a conscious decision to have people pay at the front register,” Pattie says with a laugh. “That way they had to see all the desserts in the glass case.”

From the small kitchen, Toby and his team turn out sensational pies and cakes—including seasonal specialties such as blueberry-peach pie, pumpkin-ginger cheesecake, Zwetschgenkuchen plum cake, apple strudel and Austrian stollen.

Though there is a full lunch menu, including burgers, Reubens, gyros, and terrific bone broth tortilla soup—breakfast dishes are why people wait in line for thirty minutes or more at peak times. Many have come specifically for the Cruller French Toast, created as a practical use for leftovers. The egg-dipped and griddled glazed crullers turn out not to be the teeth-ringing sugar grenades one might imagine—even when drizzled with local maple syrup. The interior of the semi-flattened cruller is eggy and airy, and the outside, crisped and golden brown.

Another big seller is corned beef hash, made from scratch using marinated corned beef brisket baked with onions, then shredded with red potatoes, onions, spices, and basil. They go through 200 pounds of it a week.

Being in a college town means having to stay current. Pattie has learned how to use Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter—and is no longer puzzled by youthful customers Snapchatting their doughnuts. The Frieds have also adapted to culinary trends by adding vegan and gluten-free dishes, including a hearty oat-based breakfast cookie, and by promoting the local farms and producers who supply the restaurant.

Still, Lou’s biggest draw is tradition. September after September, freshmen arrive and vow to complete what is known at Dartmouth as the Lou’s Challenge—that is, pulling an all-nighter and being at the restaurant at 6 a.m. when it opens. Alumni return to be playfully sassed by the same waitresses who slid them platefuls of eggs and home fries in their letter-sweatered youth. Stumping presidential candidates turn up every four years to glad-hand the crucial New Hampshire primary voters. And regulars, including Ned Redpath, the former owner of Hanover-based Coldwell Banker Redpath & Co. Realtors, who has eaten at Lou’s three to five times a week for the past twelve years, come through the door knowing they will be warmly welcomed.

“My table—booth number five—is already set for me when I arrive,” Redpath said. “And every morning Ginny, my waitress, comes over and says, ‘The usual?’ (Single egg scrambled, single white toast.) It’s kind of cool.”

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