Christmas elsewhere, and alone by choice

There is a particular kind of dread attached to booking Christmas alone: not the season itself, which most people rather like, but the shape of it, the long stretch of the 25th and 26th with nowhere in particular to be and no one in particular to be there with. Solo travel solves most problems of this kind by simply removing the comparison, and Christmas is where it does its best work, because a solo-only operator has already decided, on your behalf, that there is nothing remotely unusual about spending the day this way.

Just You, which sells nothing but solo holidays, runs a handful of short Christmas and New Year breaks to English towns chosen for looking their best with frost on the stonework and candles in the windows: Bath, Brighton, Oxford and Harrogate among them. The formula is the same in each: a small group, a single hotel, a shared Christmas lunch laid on as part of the trip rather than assembled by anyone in the party, and enough structured time together and apart that nobody has to invent conversation for four days straight or, just as important, explain why they would rather sit by the window with a book.

Four towns, four kinds of Christmas

Bath dresses for the season better than most English cities have any right to, its honey-coloured Georgian crescents lit against short winter days, with the Roman baths and Bath Abbey a short walk from wherever the hotel happens to be. It is a city built to be walked slowly, which suits a season nobody is in a hurry to finish.

Brighton takes the opposite approach: a seafront rather than a crescent, the improbable domes and minarets of the Royal Pavilion, built as George IV's seaside pleasure palace in the early nineteenth century, and a stretch of promenade cold enough in December to make the pier's lit-up amusements look considerably more inviting than they would in July.

Oxford offers a different register again: college quadrangles, the honeyed stone of Christ Church, and excursions out to Burford and Woodstock, the Cotswold town and the great house of Blenheim Palace respectively, both easy half-day trips from a city built round a university rather than a shopping street.

Harrogate, the northernmost of the four, is a Victorian spa town in the proper sense, laid out around mineral springs that once drew visitors from across the country for the water rather than the shops, with the Valley Gardens still doing much the same job today in a quieter way. A New Year trip based there also takes in York for Christmas Eve and Wetherby, whose racecourse runs a long-standing Boxing Day meeting that has become as much a part of the northern Christmas calendar as the pantomime.

What the format is actually for

The point of these trips is not that solo travellers cannot organise a nice weekend in Bath on their own. It is that Christmas specifically resists solo planning in a way other trips do not: restaurants close, hotels expect you to book a package rather than a room, and a single traveller eating alone on Christmas Day in an otherwise empty dining room is a scene nobody particularly wants, however capable they are of enjoying their own company the rest of the year. A tour built around the day removes that scene entirely, replacing it with a table that was always going to have other people at it, all of whom made the same choice for broadly the same reasons.

It also, not incidentally, removes the guesswork of a first solo Christmas. Nobody has to decide whether to cook a small version of a large meal or skip it altogether; the itinerary decides for you, and the company arrives already primed for the same four days you are having. Brighton's trip runs the same shape at the coast, for anyone who would rather spend Boxing Day looking at the sea than at a stately home.