The markets open for four weeks. The good tours go long before that.
Which Dyker Heights lights tour actually gets off the bus. What a day with the Rovaniemi husky teams costs. Whether Strasbourg or Colmar is the better Alsace base. Reviews of the festive tours you can book, wherever December takes you.
Four festive evenings that decide the rest of the trip.
A lights run, a market with a mug of Glühwein in it, an Arctic sled day and a concert. What each one costs, and what the people who booked it say.
01The lights runLondon: Christmas Lights Bus Tour With Live GuideTwo hours of the West End and the City from the top deck, with a guide who knows which streets peaked this year. The cheapest way to see all of it in one evening.
02The Arctic dayRovaniemi: Reindeer, Huskies & Santa Claus VillageReindeer sled, husky team and Santa Claus Village in one day on the Arctic Circle. The fortnight before Christmas goes first, by months.
03The market crawlDresden: Advent Tour with Stollen Tasting and Mulled WineDresden's Advent streets on foot, with a slice of stollen and a mug of mulled wine along the way. Hard to beat for the money.
04The Advent concertVienna: Christmas & New Year’s Concert in St. Peter’s ChurchAn Advent and New Year concert inside St Peter's in Vienna, most evenings through December. The church runs cold, so dress for a stone interior.
Christmas lights are a route, not a street.
A city lights one district properly and strings the rest. A bus or a guide gets you the whole run inside the two hours the cold allows, and knows which switch-on happened this week and which street is worth the walk.
London in December: the lights by bus, then the market by the river.
All of festive London →
Regent Street's angels, the Oxford Street run and the Covent Garden mistletoe are a driving route rather than a walk. Add the Southbank stalls and a carol service and the evening is full. These three carry more travellers than anything else in the city.
Open-top bus, or on foot
The bus takes Regent Street, Oxford Street, Piccadilly and the City in one run and keeps you off a crowded pavement. Walking gets you Covent Garden and Seven Dials properly, and not much else.
Southbank, and the squares behind it
The riverside stalls are the ones with the view; the smaller squares behind the Strand are where the food is worth queueing for. A guide is the difference between six stalls and thirty.
The Thames after the switch-on
The bridges and the South Bank read better from midstream than from the embankment, and a heated deck solves the one problem with a London December evening.
American Christmas is a lights drive and a ticket to a show.
Dyker Heights is a Brooklyn neighbourhood competing with itself, and half the country's festive tours end up parked on it. Four kinds of American December, what it costs to board each one, and where it runs.
★★★★★★★★★★ 4.7 · NYC: Dyker Heights Christmas Lights & Skyline View Bus Tour
Dyker Heights lightsBy coach or on foot, through Brooklyn's loudest street.
Harbour cruisesThe Manhattan skyline, a heated deck and a buffet.
Dinners and showsA stage, a carol, or a table with a view of the tree.
Private drivesYour own car and driver for the whole lights loop.
All 72 American festive tours →
Six cities that do the festive season properly.
The oldest market in Germany, a Brooklyn street that competes with itself, a village on the Arctic Circle, and the three capitals whose Advent squares are the reason people fly in.
The festive tours more travellers take than any other.
Every festive tour we have reviewed →A four-week season and a fixed number of seats each night. These are the ones that fill, and what earns each of them the slot.
1
London: Christmas Lights Bus Tour With Live Guide
See London’s Christmas lights from an open-top bus, with live stories, central landmarks, photo stops, and practical tips for cold weather and traffic.
From · $33
Read our review →
2
Rovaniemi: Reindeer, Huskies & Santa Claus Village
from $221
3
London by Night Bus Tour with Christmas Lights and Live Guide
from $41
4
Paris: Tootbus Open-Top Christmas Bus Tour
from $46
5
NYC: Dyker Heights Christmas Lights & Skyline View Bus Tour
from $69
6
London Christmas Lights Tour by Vintage Bus Open Top
from $37
7
Rovaniemi: Snowman World Entry Ticket in Santa Claus Village
from $41
8
Dyker Heights Christmas Lights Guided Tour
from $63
Lapland is the festive trip with a real booking deadline.
Rovaniemi runs on Santa Claus Village, a husky team and a reindeer sled, and the whole town is spoken for in the fortnight before Christmas. Book the day out before you book the flight, not after.
Every Arctic day out →
Most Christmas markets shut on the 23rd. Plan to the dates, not the weather.
Advent markets open in the last week of November and close two days before Christmas, so a trip landing on the 27th finds an empty square and a man dismantling a stall. The other half of the season carries on regardless: ice rinks, New Year's Eve, the winter wonderlands, and the Arctic sled teams that run to March.
What a festive evening out actually costs.
Every tour on the site, grouped by what it costs. A good number of the best December evenings come in under the price of the dinner afterwards.
Market walks, mulled-wine strolls, the lights buses and the short river cruises.
Full evenings: market food tours, church concerts, Dyker Heights by coach, dinner on the water.
Arctic sled days, private drivers, New Year sailings and the once-a-season splurge.
Three festive things that happen nowhere else.
Fairy lights and a mug of something hot turn up in every city by December. A Brooklyn street that competes with itself, a village built around one man, and a market older than the printing press do not.
Dyker Heights
A dozen blocks where households have been out-decorating each other since the 1980s, with animatronics, soundtracks and, on some houses, hired designers. The streets seize up nightly from the first week of December, which is why almost every tour arrives by coach and walks the last few blocks.
- 1NYC: Dyker Heights Christmas Lights & Skyline View Bus Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.7 · 1,192 reviews
- 2Dyker Heights Christmas Lights Guided Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 920 reviews
- 3Dyker Heights Brooklyn Christmas Lights Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 591 reviews
Santa Claus Village
A village straddling the Arctic Circle line north of Rovaniemi, open all year and hopelessly busy for the fortnight before Christmas. The post office answers the letters, the latitude is painted across the ground, and the husky and reindeer farms sit a short drive out through the trees.
- 1Rovaniemi: Reindeer, Huskies & Santa Claus Village★★★★★★★★★★ 4.6 · 2,334 reviews
- 2Rovaniemi: Snowman World Entry Ticket in Santa Claus Village★★★★★★★★★★ 4.2 · 1,081 reviews
- 3Rovaniemi: Santa Claus Village and Arctic Circle★★★★★★★★★★ 4.3 · 355 reviews
The Striezelmarkt
Dresden has held its Christmas market since 1434, which makes it the oldest in Germany, and it still turns on cake: a stollen weighing several tonnes is paraded through the old town on the Saturday before the second Advent Sunday. The Frauenkirche and the Neumarkt stalls share one square.
- 1Dresden: Advent Tour with Stollen Tasting and Mulled Wine★★★★★★★★★★ 4.4 · 140 reviews
- 2Dresden with a touch of Xmas: English small group tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.7 · 41 reviews
- 3Dresden: Festive Christmas Concert in the Zwinger★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 26 reviews
Glühwein, stollen, and a sausage the length of your forearm.
At a Christmas market the food IS the visit: a mug you pay a deposit on, a slice of stollen, raclette scraped onto bread. A food tour gets you through the six stalls worth queueing at instead of the thirty in front of you.
Four festive bookings that will not wait.
Most of a December trip can be arranged over a mug of Glühwein the night before. These four run on ticketed dates, sled teams with a fixed head count and calendars that take no interest in when your flight lands.
- 01Rovaniemi: Reindeer, Huskies & Santa Claus VillageRovaniemi is spoken for through the fortnight before Christmas, and a sled team carries a fixed number of people a day.
- 02NYC: Dyker Heights Christmas Lights & Skyline View Bus TourA set number of coach departures a night, because the Brooklyn streets cannot absorb more. December weekends go first.
- 03Vienna: Christmas & New Year’s Concert in St. Peter’s ChurchOne date and one sitting. Harbour cruises and gala dinners are sold as a dated ticket months out and never released again.
- 04Prague: The Nutcracker Ballet TicketsA theatre run of a few weeks with numbered seats. When the good nights go there is no later performance to move to.
Strasbourg, Colmar, Munich, Salzburg, Vienna, Prague: the market run people do in a week.
Strasbourg
Colmar
Munich
Salzburg
Vienna
PragueBy city — where the markets and the lights are
By kind of festive day — market, lights, sled or stage
The newest festive tour reviews.
Everything added since →
Alsatian Christmas Immersive Wine Tour with Wine Tasting
Read our review →
Christmas market lights tour bus through Berlin, free mulled wine (2.5 hours)
Read our review →
Budapest Christmas Walking Tour w Entry to Basilica
Read our review →
(Christmas Morning) Glendalough Half Day Tour from Dublin
Read our review →
Christmas in Oxford, the Cotswolds and Stratford with Lunch
Read our review →
Christmas in Santiago de Compostela: a tour among lights and stone
Read our review →
Christmas in Prague tour – a story that comes to life!
Read our review →
Christmas in New York: Skip-the-Line Holiday Lights Tour
Read our review →
Christmas in New York: Pedicab Tour & Rockefeller Tree
Read our review →
Christmas in New York: Iconic Holiday Lights Tour
Read our review →
From London: Christmas Day Trip to Windsor, Oxford & Avebury
Read our review →