A Skiing Fairytale in the Land of Chocolate
When people think of Christmas, different things spring to mind in different people. Holiday carols, family and friends gathered around beaming and laughing, the fantastic scent of fresh pine needles, twinkling lights on a Christmas tree, baking cookies cut into stars and bells and miniature Santa Clauses. The list goes on and on. But one thing that trails through almost everyone’s mind is a white Christmas. There’s a reason the phrase has become a cliché over the years and a variety of songs and poems have been composed about it. Everyone wants to peer outside their frosted window on Christmas morning and see a crystal white snow-covered wonderland outside.
Unfortunately, for those of us in warmer places, a white Christmas is an incredible rarity and a green Christmas in the 80s is a more realistic expectation. The closest my Californian city has ever come to snow on December 25th in the last twenty years was one November night when enough flakes fell from the sky for the kids to create a minuscule, melting snowman on our bench in the morning. Fortunately, if you and your family have got your heart set on snowflakes on Christmas morning, there are alternative places to spend your holiday that can promise a much more reliable bout of snow.
One of these places is St. Moritz, a snowy fairytale city nestled in the heart of cosy Switzerland. Personally, it was about five years ago when my family and I finally decided we’d had enough, packed up our belongings on December 20th, and hopped on a plane headed straight for the white valleys of the snowy Switzerland city.
My family and I happen to be an active bunch, so what we eagerly came across in St. Moritz was a fantastic skiing experience. Although there are a ton of ski resorts to choose from in the city, we opted for Engadin, a ski palace fit for royalty wedged between two substantial skiing hills. The outside of the resort didn’t lie; inside Engadin, we were definitely treated like a royal family, and we found nothing less than a friendly, warm, cosy Christmas experience that was just like home, except for better food and some snow!
The skiing experiences themselves were absolutely fantastic. The snow in St. Mortiz is unbelievably perfect for skiing and the hills surrounding Engadin were varying sizes, great for rock-bottom beginners like me to seasoned professionals in the sport.
If scraping down a snow-covered mountain with slabs of wood strapped to your feet isn’t your idea of the way you’d like to spend your Christmas, there are plenty of other things you can do from the comfort of the ski lodge. When I was frozen and tired of skiing for the day, I could always look forward to diving into the mystery book series I picked up from the fantastic bookstore in the ski lodge in a puffy armchair by the fire with a mug of the absolute most decadent, sweetest, creamiest, richest hot cocoa I have ever tasted. I think I probably bought out the entire lodge’s supply trying to purchase enough of the mix to stuff in my suitcase to take home. I guess everyone’s not lying when they Switzerland is renowned as the land of chocolate!
Catherine is an experienced travel writer for My Premium Europe a leading provider of luxury holidays in Europe.
