The 9 best Christmas towns to visit around the world

Drive 15 minutes east from Alaska’s state capital Fairbanks and you’ll come across North Pole: a town with candy canes painted on the streets and festive parades throughout the summer months. It’s also home to the Santa Claus House gift shop and the world’s largest fibreglass Santa statue. Before you get carried away, it isn’t the actual North Pole – that’d be about 1,700 miles further north.

Rovaniemi calls itself the ‘Official Hometown of Santa Claus’ and it’s hard to argue with that. The main population centre of Finnish Lapland, Rovaniemi is best known for its spectacular Santa Claus Village amusement park, which features Santa himself (yes, the real one). That’s open year-round, but it’s basically always a white Christmas here – the edge of the Arctic Circle is just five miles away – so winter brings plenty of opportunities for sleigh rides and overnight stays in igloos.

This city in eastern France is famed for being home to the nation’s oldest Christmas market, but much like its nearby neighbour Colmar, no matter the time of year, Strasbourg is giving festive. Is it the warm glow of streetlights on the 17th century facades? Is it the pretty reflections of the water, or the cobbled lanes? There’s just a Christmassy vibe about Strasbourg. 

A fairytale-like enclave halfway between Frankfurt and Munich, Rothenburg ob der Tauber is one of Germany’s best-preserved walled towns – and it’s great for Christmas-themed holidays, no matter the season. Not just visually magic, Rothenburg is also home to the German Christmas Museum, which offers a comprehensive lowdown of the holiday’s history and traditions. And if you do visit around Yuletide, the annual Reiterlesmarkt is up there with Europe’s best Christmas markets.

Lots of Poland’s cities are characterised by pretty, late-Renaissance style buildings and quaint streets which suit being adorned in lights when December rolls around, but Gdańsk’s position on the Baltic Sea gives it a wintery feel all year-round. Sure, the city really comes to life when the market opens for the festive season (it’s the largest and longest-running in the Pomeranian Voivodeship region), but if you’re after a flavour of Christmas throughout the rest of the year, it’s not a bad place to start. 

Where better to start than somewhere literally named Santa Claus? This Indiana town is Christmas-themed for all 12 months of the year, with festive-themed stuff that ranges from a Santa Claus Museum and a novelty attraction called Santa’s Candy Castle to a post office that receives – and replies to – thousands of children’s letters to Santa every year. There are several places in the US named Santa Claus (the others are in Georgia and Arizona) but the one in Indiana is the Christmassiest by a country mile.

A little tradition that’s been going for 61 years now is the Mousehole Harbour Lights. The attraction, which completely illuminates the little bay at the very tip of Cornwall, draws visitors from all over the UK and is an accumulation of a whopping 10,000 bulbs. While it’s not on all year long, the weaving little houses of the village sit stacked atop one another overlooking the water, and it feels like a particularly cosy spot along the coast.

Thanks to the charming timber of its traditional architecture style, quite a lot of the eastern French region of Alsace boasts seriously Christmassy vibes. But nowhere are those vibes quite as strong as in the town of Colmar, with its picture-perfect old town, narrow cobbled streets and slightly surreal neatness. It’s really not hard to imagine elves scuttling through the town’s gingerbread-house style streets. While it’s a merry old place year-round, Colmar is at its festive best during the wintertime.

Sunny Florida might not be the first place that comes to mind when you think of Christmas, but the southern US state has an entire town named after the holiday – and, as you can imagine, it’s pretty darn Christmassy. Although it has a tree and decorations up all year, Christmas, FL, gets particularly popular during the festive season. After all, what could be cooler than receiving a card with a Christmas postmark?