Cancel Your Flights: Malta Tops CNN’s List Of Best Places For A Christmas Vacation
If you’ve been stuck on where to spend the Christmas holidays, CNN have got a simple solution: stay home. The popular news site’s Travel section has listed down 15 of the best place to have a Christmas vacation, and guess what’s sitting at the top of the list? Yep, good old Malta.
According to the CNN piece, the listed destinations “celebrate Christmas better than the rest”, varying from classic choices like New York to interesting alternatives like Honolulu in Hawaii.
The featured photo of the article itself is a shot from Malta; Naxxar’s piazza filled with lights and colours… even if it was labelled as “Downtown Valletta.”
Here’s what CNN had to say about Christmas in Malta:
“Visiting presepju, or nativity scenes, is an integral part of Christmas in Malta. Every year, residents proudly open their shutters, and sometimes even their garage doors, to display their holy crib confections to the public.
On a grander scale, the Bethlehem f’Ghajnsielem is a life-size nativity spread over 20,0000 square meters of formerly abandoned fields.
Inhabited and animated by more than 150 actors, including entire families, the village takes visitors back in time to Judea of 2,000 years ago, complete with oil lamps, turn mills, grazing animals, crafts areas teaching traditional skills and folklore, a tavern and, of course, a grotto housing baby Jesus.
Downtown Valletta is also home to a lively Christmas spirit, with carolers singing outside the Baroque St. John’s Co-Cathedral during Advent, and a dizzying display of Christmas lights on Republic Street.
The Manoel Theater is well known for its annual Christmas pantomime.
A visit to the privately owned Malta Toy Museum, featuring dolls, soldiers, train sets, and clockwork tin trinkets dating as far back as the 1790s, is a heartwarming homage to childhood.”
Other destinations that made the list are Bath (England), Barcelona (Spain), Rovaniemi (Finland), Nuremberg (Germany), Quebec City (Canada), Reykjavik (Iceland), San Miguel de Allende (Mexico), Salzburg (Austria), Strasbourg (France), Queenstown (New Zealand), Valkenburg (The Netherlands), and a curious little town in Indiana that’s literally called Santa Claus.
So if you were planning on going on a holiday for the Christmas season but weren’t sure which destination to pick, you might be better off staying on the islands after all!
Tag someone who loves Christmas… and someone who’s a typical Scrooge!
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