Christmas and new year holidays

If you want to get out of the routine of turkey, spuds and board-games, and inject an extra frisson of festivity into your Christmas and New Year celebrations, a Christmas holiday could be the perfect present to yourself. From Berlin’s fifty Christmas markets to Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens sparkling with fairy lights, experience the cities that know exactly how to wake up your Christmas spirit. You could be celebrating Midnight Mass with the Pope in St Peter’s Square, hunting for Father Christmas and his elves in snowy Lapland, enjoying an Aussie-style yule beach barbeque, or heading to Bethlehem where it all began. And as for New Year…well, it’s an art form! Raise a dram to a proper Scottish Hogmanay in Edinburgh and hear Auld Lang Syne as it should be sung, or see in the New Year in New York style as you count down with the Times Square ball drop.