Welcome to the Christmas Hotel

I've always loved Christmas.  I know some people don't, but for me, it's a magical period of the year when everything changes and the ordinary world becomes a place of wonder.  However, when I look back at Christmas as a child, with no responsibilities other than to enjoy the experience, it seemed to last forever, with Christmas Day being merely the highlight of two or three weeks of excitement.  As the years have passed, Christmas has become increasingly fleeting with work commitments sometimes meaning it's almost entirely lost with nothing but a brief nod towards tradition.  No sooner has the tree been erected than it seems it's being taken down again.  We're all working until the last moment before the big day and most of us are back at work again on the 27th.  Blink, and you miss it.

I can't remember when I first had the idea for a "Christmas Hotel", but it must have been many decades ago.  I don't claim this is an original idea, I'm sure I've seen TV shows or read stories covering the same idea, but it's one I've thought about incessantly.  The practicality of the venture is daunting, so this blog will serve as possibly the closest I'll ever get to actually building the darn thing.

What is the Christmas Hotel?  The idea is straightforward.  A hotel where every week, Saturday is Christmas Day.  Guests would arrive on the Thursday, enjoy Christmas Eve on the Friday, Christmas on Saturday, and Boxing Day on Sunday, checking out on Monday.  So far, not that unusual, I know such places already exist.  But my Christmas Hotel would pull out ALL the stops.  It would be more than just decorations and a meal.  When you spend the weekend at this hotel, everything that makes a traditional Christmas (as seen through the eyes of a UK resident) would be in place, and that's quite a tall order.

The next few blogs will examine my vision of the hotel, and each element that goes into that vision.  I'll then seek out expert advice to gauge whether those plans could possibly be achieved and, if so, roughly how much it would cost.  First of all, it's got to feel like Christmas.

Nothing spoils a Chrismas more than warm weather.  While snow at Christmas in the UK is statistically rare (it is, after all, only early Winter, and there are more snow days, on average, in February than there are in December), the idea of snow is firmly entrenched in our traditions.  We can mostly blame that on Charles Dickens, who wrote in the mid-1800s when there were several heavy snow falls and whose stories include many descriptions of snow and ice at Christmas.  We can also blame the burgeoning Christmas card trade that appeared around the same time.  The cards of that era all showed snowy scenes, and no matter how unrealistic that perception is, it's firmly linked to Christmas.

The hotel must, therefore, be surrounded by snow, and it's got to be cold "outside".  Properly cold, cold enough to need gloves and scarves and to feel "Jack Frost nipping at your toes".  There's no way to achieve this all year round, especially not if we want to be able to precisely control the temperature and snowfall, so we're facing a big challenge at the first fence.  How can this be solved?

Read on to find out, in "The Environment".