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From ski towns buried in fresh powder to warm-weather escapes that skip winter entirely, these are the 15 best American winter vacations worth planning around.

Summer gets all the attention in European travel planning, which is exactly why winter is worth reconsidering. Fewer crowds, lower prices, and a version of these cities — snow on centuries-old rooftops, thermal baths steaming in freezing air, the Northern Lights actually visible — that simply doesn’t exist the rest of the year. Winter in…

Some American towns don’t just decorate for Christmas — they’ve built their entire identity around it. A Bavarian village in the Cascade Mountains that goes all-in on Alpine lighting. A town literally named Santa Claus. The world’s largest Christmas store, open 361 days a year in rural Michigan. These aren’t generic “pretty at the holidays”…

Vienna and Budapest sit under three hours apart by train, and both run genuinely excellent Christmas markets at the same time of year — which makes combining them one of the most efficient Christmas trips in Europe. You get Vienna’s scale and variety, Budapest’s cheaper prices and its basilica backdrop, and a train ride through…

Budapest’s Christmas markets don’t get the same reflexive name-recognition as Vienna’s or Strasbourg’s, which is exactly why they’re worth knowing about — the two main markets are genuinely excellent, noticeably cheaper than their Western European counterparts, and set against a skyline that does as much visual work as any market stall. St. Stephen’s Basilica lit…

Vienna doesn’t run one Christmas market — it runs about twenty of them, scattered across the city from late November through New Year. Most visitors see the famous one in front of City Hall and call it done. That’s a mistake. Vienna’s markets each have a genuinely different character, and the best version of a…

The smell hits before anything else — roasted chestnuts, mulled wine, cinnamon from a gingerbread stall you haven’t found yet. European Christmas markets have been running some version of this same formula since the 1400s, and the good ones still work exactly the way they always did: wooden stalls, string lights, a main square built…

Stowe does one thing better than almost anywhere else in New England: it puts a white church steeple directly in front of a mountain and lets fall foliage do the rest. The view from the meadow south of the village — Stowe Community Church, Mount Mansfield rising behind it, maples burning red and orange in…

Vermont doesn’t ease you in. You cross the state line and the trees are already doing something that makes you reach for your phone — not because no photograph will do it justice, but because you need to prove to yourself it’s real. The maples go scarlet and orange before the elms go gold, and…