vermont

by BILL SCHELLER

he table was splendidly set for Christmas Eve dinner. Red candles flanked a centerpiece of evergreens and flowers; napkins were tied with ribbons and holly. A cheery fire blazed on the hearth. But no dinner would be served, since this was Christmas 1912, preserved as if in amber. I was at Hildene, home of presidential son Robert Todd Lincoln and his family, tucked between the Green and Taconic mountains outside Manchester, Vermont. Although Hildene was the Lincolns’ summer retreat, they spent at least three Christmases here, and each December, Hildene’s curators deck the house in the style of a century ago. “We learn more every year about how people like the Lincolns decorated,” docent Melissa Smith told me. “We’re always striving for accuracy in portraying Hildene as it was at Christmas in their day.”

That portrayal even extends to the tree, a Vermont white spruce like the one that the Lincolns would have had cut. “In those days they preferred trees with big, open branches,” Smith explained, “so that they could hang ornaments within the tree instead of just on the outside.” Many of Hildene’s ornaments are period antiques; others, including strings of popcorn and cranberries, are old-time homemade baubles.

It was Christmas Eve throughout the house, where it seemed as though the family had just gone out. Cards lined a bookshelf; red velvet stockings hung over the parlor hearth. I ducked into a servant’s room and saw a tabletop tree. The butler had been wrapping presents in his bedroom. But Mrs. Lincoln must have been at home; carols, and a Bach toccata, floated from the thousand pipes of her Aeolian organ.

I was wishing that I could stay for

Many Vermont communities put on a show for the holidays, but I’ve discovered two—Manchester and Woodstock—that make an especially festive effort. Turning back the Christmas clock at Hildene is only one part of a celebration that ranges over several weeks throughout the twin villages of Manchester and Manchester Center. Woodstock’s festivities culminate in a mid-December weekend of music, firelight, and a horse-drawn parade.

Manchester Merriment and the area’s Christmas hospitality are the places where hospitality is the stock in trade. Fifteen area hostelries participate in two weekends of inn tours, each out to top the other in cookies and evergreens, cocoa and holly. My own base , where, as I sat in the charmingly decorated parlor, I learned just how popular Manchester has become in the weeks before Christmas. “We’re here for the second time,” said one guest to another in a decidedly Appalachian accent as the two sat by the fire, “but it seems that everyone we meet here is on their 12th or 13th visit.”

The man was from Kentucky, and his observation was seconded by innkeeper Frank Hanes. “People book way in advance,” he said, “and come here every year at this time.” No one at the inn was a skier, so the draw must be Manchester’s Christmas cheer.

I inn-toured my way between Manchester Center and Manchester, with a notable stop at the sprawling and spa(best snacks, with smoked salmon breaking in on the endless march of cookies), and finally Wilburton

. Here I discovered a Christmas tradition that started as something entirely spontaneous—something so gloriously loony that it never could have been planned or put on a program.

Because nobody could have come up

I was standing in the Wilburton’s great baronial salon, toasting myself by the fire (and, yes, munching cookies) and admiring a Christmas tree that looked as though a cadre of stylists had descended on the inn after finishing with the White House. The truth, I soon learned, was even more remarkable.

“Do you like our tree? I’ll tell you how it gets decorated every year.” Melissa Levis, who, with her father and brother, Albert and Max Levis, runs the Wilburton, was standing with me alongside the cookie table, keeping an eye on her Cavalier King Charles spaniel (who, in turn, had his eye on the cookies). “Three women from New York State stay with us on ‘girls’ weekend’ trips a couple of times a year. Back in 2005, a few weeks before Christmas, they were sitting by the fire after a cocktail or two. The power was out, the tree was up, and the ornaments were still in boxes. One of them said, ‘Let’s decorate the tree.’ They did—and they’ve done it ever since.”

Santa’s Workshop

A sampling of Yuletide shopping destinations in Manchester and Woodstock, where you’ll find treasures big and small for everyone on your list … For more suggestions, visit Manchester & the Mountains Regional Chamber of Commerce (visitmanchester vt.com) and the Woodstock Area Chamber of Commerce (woodstockvt.com).

MANCHESTER

Manchester Designer Outlets

More than 40 stores, from Ann Taylor and Armani couture to Yankee Candle home fragrances and Yves Delorme linens—plus fine art, apparel, footwear, cosmetics, birdhouses, and everything in between, all in a series of authentically restored buildings. 800-9557467; manchester designeroutlets.com

Mother Myrick’s Confectionery

Everything to make your holidays merry and bright: chocolates, caramels, cookies, cakes, pies, hot-fudge sauce, pastries, and signature buttercrunch. 802-362-1560; mothermyricks.com

Northshire Bookstore

A favorite New England destination for book lovers, housed in a 19thcentury former inn, with a café, kids’ floor, gifts, and stationery. 802-3622200; northshire.com

Orvis Company

Flagship store featuring the company’s renowned fly-fishing department, plus clothing, travel equipment, and more. 802-362-3750; orvis.com

Village Shops at the Equinox Neat white-clapboard houses, located across the village green from the Equinox Resort & Spa (195 rooms in 5 buildings, plus 5 dining options), featuring distinctive Vermont clothing, crafts, antiques, and fine sporting apparel.

WOODSTOCK

Collective: The Art of Craft Gallery featuring handwrought home décor, clothing, jewelry, and fine art in a variety of media, including glass, fiber, pottery, metal, wood, and paper. Housed in a

19th-century former flax mill on the Kedron River. 802-457-1298; collectivetheartofcraft.com

Farmhouse Pottery

Artisanal wares for kitchen and home. 802-774-8373; farmhousepottery.com

F. H. Gillingham & Sons General Store

Vermont-made cheeses, soaps, maple, specialty foods, home décor, toys, crafts, muck boots, and more—even a selection of musical instruments. 800-344-6668; gillinghams.com

Danforth Pewter

Lamps, jewelry, ornaments, kitchenware, gifts, and more, handcrafted in Middlebury, Vermont. 800-222-3142; danforthpewter.com

Yankee Bookshop

Vermont’s oldest operating independent book store (est. 1935). 802-457-2411; yankeebookshop.com

The “Twinkle Girls” got their name, though, by decorating themselves. I got to see the finished product: three plush reindeer, bedecked with big red bows, lollipops and candy canes, and tall furry hats on which gingerbread men defied gravity. Each outfit was festooned with flashing colored lights. You might say they … twinkled.

“The outfits started as gifts we gave each other,” said Pam Ogden, who with friends Julia Scarincio and Janice Blair were the humans beneath the reindeer. “We’ve been elves, giraffes—we even wear the costumes when we go to restaurants here. We have no problem being the center of attention.” And in 2014, Manchester made them just that: the lead float in the Lighted Tractor Parade, an annual tradition.

If a two-legged reindeer can carry a string of lights, so can a John Deere— or anything else with wheels. Tractors are just part of the rolling illumination on Manchester Center’s Main Street and its roundabouts, on a Saturday evening when everything from riding mowers to pickups, some towing elaborate floats, makes a stately, sparkling procession. And the twinkliest, most over-the-top display wins $500.

Two weeks later, on the weekend just before Christmas, I was back in town to ride the Manchester Lions Club’s Elf Express. There hasn’t been passenger rail service here for years—but elves, like their famous employer, exist outside of time. Aboard vintage Vermont Railway cars, the Elf Express carries children, their adults, and a spirited troupe of elves on hour-long excursions enlivened by an original elf performance. As I waited to board the day’s first express, coach Jim Raposa—director of drama at local Burr and Burton Academy—explained that the elves are all BBA students, who each dedicate more than 50 hours perfecting their 15-minute show.

“We have a cast of 20,” Jim told me. “They put on the same show in each of the four cars; it’s all coordinated to recorded music piped from the central car.” Sure enough, as I sipped hot chocolate near the rear door of my car, I could watch our elves and the elves in the following car synchronize perfectly to the music, all at the same point in their story about looking for the popular children’s book character Christopher Pop-In-Kins.

There’s a fifth car, up front behind the locomotive, with no elves or riders onboard. But toward the end of the trip, its single passenger emerges. It’s Santa himself—and, back at the station in Manchester Depot, he’s joined by none other than the elusive Christopher Pop-In-Kins.

Sixty miles to the northeast, Woodstock’s mid-December Winter Wassail Weekend was in full swing as I arrived at Billings Farm’s capacious barn at the same time as Tom and Jerry. They’re a handsome pair of Belgian draft horses, chestnut in color, and they were just returning with a bundled-up sleighload of visitors to this premier model farm.

As I had in Manchester, I began my Christmastime stay in Woodstock with a home visit—this time to 1890 instead of 1912, and to a home far more modest than the Lincolns’ Hildene. The farm manager’s house at Billings Farm was nonetheless festively done up, its parlor tree decked out in handmade ornaments—“the kind the family might have seen in magazines,” I learned from docent Patty Arnison. “Just like now, magazines then were full of articles on how to decorate for Christmas.”

And although today’s farm manager doesn’t live in this period-preserved dwelling, he and his entire staff might easily have come by and tucked into a feast of pies and plum pudding—all the products of the great wood-fired kitchen range, and all arrayed on the diningroom table. There was even what Patty called a “Jack Horner pie”: two crusts, with prizes tucked between. “You pulled one of the ribbons in the top crust,” she explained, “and out popped a prize.”

Down in a basement room, visitors were crafting pomanders, those fragrant traditional ornaments made by studding an orange with cloves. I hadn’t made holiday decorations since Cub Scout days, but I think I did a creditable job and hope that my pomander found a place on the tree upstairs, just as in an 1890s magazine.

Leaving pomander-making to a bevy of newly arrived visitors, I headed into town, where my wife, Kay, and I had checked into the Woodstock Inn . Split logs no less than four feet long flamed up briskly in a hearth that toasted loungers in the big lobby, where kids scampered in and out of a “gingerbread” house the size of a garden shed. Upstairs, our own room’s wood fire was ready to light, but outdoors it was Woodstock itself that was alight with warmth and cheer. As we crossed the Green, heading for the first of several homes on the weekend house tour, we watched Wassail workers stacking logs into a tall hexagonal pyre, stuffed with tinder, that they would ignite at dusk.

Around the periphery, others were placing luminaries—candles set into translucent paper bags. There were, I’d heard, exactly 400 of them. I figured there was some significance to that number. “Why 400?” I asked one of the luminary men (who might, for all I knew, have been a local luminary). “Because,” he replied, “that’s how many it takes to go around the Green, seven feet apart.” I should have known. Vermonters are nothing if not practical and prosaic.

The houses on the tour, most of them facing the Green and backing onto the snowy banks of the Ottauquechee River, were hardly prosaic in the sumptuousness of their holiday decorations. New England–austere on the outside, they’d been remodeled inside to levels of luxury that would have scandalized their colonial builders. As

I heard one volunteer say as I slipped on my mandatory carpet-protecting booties, “If I were as old as this house, I wouldn’t look half as good.”

Woodstock’s village center, as old as those houses and looking just as good, was cinematically Christmasy. A highschool brass band played carols on the traffic island at the main intersection. A children’s choir sang at the triplearched entrance to the Romanesque Norman Williams Public Library

Swags of greenery framed the windows of cafés, where patrons warmed themselves over hot chocolate. Walking along Elm Street, I passed a man wearing a topper, and he seemed not at all out of place. Tipping my Borsalino, I said to him, “And I thought fedoras were old hat!”

Later that afternoon we secured the last spots aboard the Woodstock Inn’s horse-drawn wagon in Saturday’s key event, the Wassail Parade . Every vehicle in the parade was horsedrawn—and as the wagons lined up on the outskirts, I saw Tom and Jerry, from Billings Farm, impatiently tapping their hooves. Our horses were Duke and Dan, another pair of Belgians, each nearly a ton of muscle and resplendent in tack of gleaming silver and black leather. They were workhorses on a weekend lark. “I harvested 1,800 bales of hay with them last summer,” said their owner, Phil Warren, who had brought them over from New Hampshire for the event.

Alongside the wagons, the Belgians’ smaller kin carried riders dressed as Santa, elves, and characters from Lord of the Rings and Frozen . Like a procession headed for some medieval Yuletide fair, we clopped and lumbered into the center of town and back to the outskirts. “Wave to the crowds slowly,” Phil advised, “like the Queen of England.” Best of all, Phil asked Kay and me whether we’d like to take the driver’s seat with him as he made his way back through town toward Billings Farm. It was our own parade, though this time we held off on the royal wave.

Live performances are mainstays of Wassail Weekend. Among offerings of jazz, high-school theatre, and readings of Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” our favorite was a set of a capella numbers sung by a Bostonarea group called “The Sly Voxes,” on the mezzanine of Williams Library.

When it was over, we walked out to see that dusk had turned to dark. The luminaries were all lit and flickering against the snow around the Green and, perhaps because a few of the 400 had been left over, right up the library steps. On the Green, the Yule fire was collapsing into embers.

This season’s Manchester Merriment is scheduled for November 28–January 2; Woodstock’s Winter Wassail Weekend is set for December 11–13. More photos at: Yankee Magazine.com/Vermont-Christmas

Travel journalist Bill Scheller has been writing for Yankee and its family of publications for half of our 80-year history—most recently, “Finding the 1930s” (Jan./Feb. 2015). Bill and his wife, Kay, live in northern Vermont, 18 miles south of the Canadian border.

When You Go

Manchester

HILDENE

802-362-1788; hildene.org

MANCHESTER MERRIMENT 802-362-6313; visitmanchestervt.com

INN AT MANCHESTER 802-362-1793; innatmanchester.com

INN AT ORMSBY HILL 802-362-1163; ormsbyhill.com

WILBURTON INN 802-362-2500; wilburtoninn.com

ELF EXPRESS 800-362-4144; manchesterlionselftrain.com

WOODSTOCK

WINTER WASSAIL WEEKEND 802-457-3555; woodstockvt.com/wassail.php

BILLINGS FARM & MUSEUM 802-457-2355; billingsfarm.org

WOODSTOCK INN 802-332-6853; woodstockinn.com

NORMAN WILLIAMS PUBLIC LIBRARY 802-457-2295; normanwilliams.org t begins in silence—a silence so deep it hums in your ears. Then, footsteps. The monks file in, saying nothing. If this were summer, sunlight would be streaming through the rose window at the rear of the church, bathing the sanctuary in glittering blues and reds. But tonight, at the dawn of winter, there is darkness; only a hint of moonlight filters in from the hallway. No one ascends the altar. The monks take their places in two facing pews, while the abbot and cantor stand in the space between them. A few lights above cast a puddle of illumination around the men, bestowing a passing brilliance on their white robes.

After Mass on Palm Sunday, sunlight streaming through the windows of the sacristy at St. Joseph’s Abbey catches the lingering smoke of incense, while a monk prepares for Holy Week services to come.

And then they pray. Many of their voices are old and harsh, but there is beauty in the singing—the kind you might see in a father calming an infant. It’s the beauty of a task done lovingly.

Vespers is an ancient tradition, one that has remained essentially unchanged since the 6th century. Every night across the world, Catholic monks gather for evening prayer—a chain of faith unbroken over 1,500 years. It almost seems out of place here. Just miles away, the town of Spencer, Massachusetts, goes about its business. On Main Street, families grab a bite to eat at the local pizzeria, and teens gather listlessly in the parking lot of the Cumberland Farms. From the crest of the hill where the abbey sits, the lights of Worcester can be seen burning low on the horizon. The world these monks have left behind is ever at their doorstep. It doesn’t tempt them much, but none deny its influence. The world outside has changed drastically in the past 50 years, and the monks are changing with it. Slowly, deliberately, they are defining what it means to be a monk in the 21st century, searching for new voices to take up the song when theirs fade away.

Father Dominic remembers the day he first entered St. Joseph’s Abbey to begin his life as a monk. As he followed his mentor up the path to the monastery, they passed before the statue of St. Benedict in the courtyard, his stone fingers pressed to his lips in an eternal “Hush.” When they reached the door, the older monk stopped and said, “This is the entrance.” Then he pointed to the cemetery beside them. “And that’s the exit.”

“And then he didn’t say another word to me. He took me to my cell and left me.” Dominic chuckles as he tells the story. That was 33 years ago. Since that day, he has called St. Joseph’s home, and he is now the abbey’s prior, or second-in-command. The monks here belong to the Cistercian Order of the Strict Observance (commonly known as the Trappists). They live cloistered lives, which means that they never leave the abbey grounds except in cases of emergency or absolute necessity. When they join the order, they offer their whole lives to the abbey. It demands no less.

If you were going to pick any place to spend the rest of your life, you could do much worse than St. Joseph’s. The monks built the monastery in the

1950s from stones they picked from the surrounding fields. It’s a handsome building, but not opulent, with a long, low-pitched roof that affects a humble appearance, as though the abbey itself were bowed in prayer. Old dairy fields spill down the hill for acres in every direction. To the north you can see the mountains of New Hampshire; to the south, the rolling expanse of Connecticut. At night, the stars are breathtaking.

The wind is cold as I follow Dominic through the abbey grounds. The leaves are off the trees, and a lone monk can be seen in the distance raking them into piles. Dominic wears an L.L. Bean jacket over his white robes to keep out the chill. Years of back trouble have left him with the hint of a stoop, but it doesn’t slow him down much. His voice barely rises above a whisper even when we’re alone.

As we walk through the abbey, Dominic notes all the things that have changed since he arrived. He points out the solarium where the monks keep their newspapers. In the old days, the abbot would remove all the interior pages, leaving just the front and back, so that the brothers wouldn’t waste too much time with it. In the library, Dominic confesses that he still feels guilty sitting in the room’s cushioned chairs; when he arrived, monks sat only on stools. He laughs as he remembers the day they installed a multiline phone system: “The phone would ring and everyone would run because no one knew how to answer it.”

The core of the lifestyle remains the same, however. Trappists follow the Rule of St. Benedict, a 6th-century code of conduct. They are celibate and have no money of their own. They observe nine prayer services every day, the first of which begins promptly at 3:30 a.m. And despite some protestations, they remain vegetarian owing to the Rule’s flesh of four-footed animals.” “We keep trying to remind the abbot that chickens have two feet,” Dominic jokes. He does this constantly. It’s a trait I found in all the monks I met. They are committed to the lifestyle, but they are not zealots. They understand how funny their lifestyle seems to the world outside, and they’re keenly aware of what they’ve given up to live it. Dominic doesn’t regret his choices. He says that the deprivation is part of the process. “The boundaries help us know ourselves better,” he says. By removing themselves from the distractions of society, they gain the freedom to concentrate on the deeper questions of existence. They spend much of their time looking inward, searching for a deeper understanding of their faith and listening for the voice of God to speak to them in the darkness.

Shortly after Dominic joined the order, his mentor gave him an exercise: He told Dominic to repeat a single psalm in his mind all day. Dominic

By obeyed. Through his work hours and prayer services he examined those words from every angle. By the evening he was exhausted and asked his mentor how long he had to keep repeating that psalm. “Until you become it,” he replied.

OPPOSITE : In the sacristy, Father Patrick prepares for Mass. THIS PAGE, ABOVE : Communion bread and wine await the start of a Mass in celebration of the 50th anniversary of Brother Conrad’s profession of solemn vows. BELOW : “Separated neither in life nor in death.” In the Abbey’s cemetery rest the Trappist brethren who have gone before, including those who served in the order’s Canadian communities in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

THIS PAGE : After six months as postulants (prospective candidates for admission to the order), Brother Charbel and Brother Micah are clothed as novices and received into the community. OPPOSITE : Brother Thomas leads a procession of priests through the Reading Cloister and into the church.

This level of religious devotion isn’t for everyone, Dominic admits. Monasticism is a rare calling, and one that is being heard by fewer and fewer young people. Trappists aspire to a life that is “ordinary, obscure, and laborious”; that’s a hard sell to the Millennial generation.

When we reach the cemetery, Dominic guides me towards the rear. The rows of white crosses have gotten longer since he arrived, and the number of monks living within the walls has shrunk. The brothers built the abbey when they were flush with recruits following World War II, but now those men are reaching the ends of their lives. Only 61 monks remain here. Their median age is 70.

We stop at a large rock at the edge of the burial ground. The brothers moved to Spencer after their previous abbey had burned down. When they did, they exhumed the bodies that had been buried there; they rest here now. A small plaque on the stone reads: “Separated neither in life nor in death.”

Trappists are not hermits. The trials of their shared life form a bond that spans generations. They cherish their brothers—the ones they live with, the ones who came before, and the ones they pray will come after. When they plan, they do so with the next 100 years in mind so that others may enjoy the life they have. For St. Joseph’s that means preparing for a time when more brothers are finding the exit than the entrance.

Hidden on the far side of the hill, Spencer Brewery sprawls like a beached leviathan—a great, hulking rectangle of industry. The building is stateof-the-art. Inside it’s all white walls, floor-to-ceiling windows, and stainless-steel fixtures. Father Isaac looks terribly out of place.

Wearing his white-and-black habit, he sits behind a huge wooden desk that might have been salvaged from a Scottish castle. He hadn’t aspired to this. Before he became the director of the most ballyhooed craft brewery to open in the past 10 years, he’d never had his own bank account or tasted a beer more exotic than Coors. He explains that he was originally brought into the project because he “understood craftsmanship.” He was a potter. “I don’t do much pottery work anymore,” he quips.

Like Dominic, he laughs easily and often. The absurdity of his situation isn’t lost on him, but this is what he was asked to do, so he obeys to the best of his ability.

Trappists believe that monasteries should be self-sufficient. The days sometimes by greed.” He says there’s an inherent “conflictual element” between the business world and the monastic one, but it’s their responsibility to balance the two.

Trappists are taught that what they do in the workplace is as important as what they do in church. It’s almost like a proving ground. It’s one thing to be pious and peaceful in the silence of your cell; maintaining that peace when the monk next to you breaks the label machine and slows down production is something else entirely. “There’s always one more slammer coming down the road at you,” Isaac says. “So you just have to decide whether you’re going to be responsible for your thoughts or not.” when an abbey could scratch out a living from the fields is long gone, so most have turned to industry. They try to keep most brothers working at manual labor, but as their businesses have become more complex, inevitably some get sucked into white-collar work. One monk packs boxes; the next negotiates liability insurance and wrangles with distributors.

The brewery is a new venture for St. Joseph’s (it opened in 2014), but not for the order. Trappist monks in Belgium and Holland have been brewing for centuries, and their beer is celebrated as some of the best in the world. When St. Joseph’s announced that it would start producing Spencer, the first Trappist beer ever brewed in North America, the media swooned. A brewery couldn’t have asked for a better head start.

But for the monks, it’s not about the beer. Later, Father Dominic laid out the abbey’s financials in simple terms. As the brothers were growing older, their medical expenses were increasing, and there were fewer young men to work to pay them. Their other two companies (The Holy Rood guild, which makes vestments for priests, and Trappist Preserves, a jam company) just couldn’t carry the load. Beer offered a way forward.

Isaac says that it can be challenging: “Doing business at the level I do it, an awful lot of it is about managing conflict motivated at least by desire,

Like Isaac, Dominic works primarily in administration, and it wears on him. No one becomes a monk because he’s interested in human resources. He says that when he joined the order, he had envisioned a life spent in the fields and had brought along only his habit, a pair of blue jeans, and his work boots. He’s made peace with his work, though. He knows why he’s doing it.

The infirmary was the last part of the abbey to be built. It’s a simple brick building with large windows that look out on the surrounding fields and the forested hills beyond. “We gave them

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