For the last thirteen years, on the second weekend in December, there are some delicious cookies being sampled and some great country inns being visited in New Hampshire. People come from all over New England to take part in this annual event. The White Mountains are lovely at any time of year, but at Christmas time they really sparkle.
The ideal way to enjoy this event is to book a package at one of the fifteen participating inns which will include your room for a night or two, tickets to the tour, a delicious breakfast, recipe cards for all the cookies and if you visit all the inns you will receive a souvenir Christmas ornament. There are gingerbread houses created by local bakers that you vote on and best of all a drawing for a $250 stay at one of the inns.
You will be given a map with directions to all the inns. It is a good idea to formulate a plan of attack. We started at the farthest north inn and worked our way south finishing up on Sunday with the Admiral Peary House in Fryeburg ME. You have from 11am on Saturday morning until 4pm on Sunday afternoon to complete the rounds. The inns are available at 11am both days and close to visits at 4pm.
The inns are all very different from each other. They are decorated in their best Christmas finery and you get to look into at least one of their bedrooms, at some inns more. Some of the inns are elegant and romantic, others are down home comfortable. You will get to see them at their best.
We stayed at the Riverbend Inn in Chocorua New Hampshire. It is a gorgeous place and the two innkeepers are delightful. We had room three which was an excellent choice. Breakfast is amazing and their cookies, well the fact that they gave us samples on our nightstand on Friday night guaranteed that we were in a very good mood when we set out on Saturday morning.
We never considered what we would do with all the cookies, we thought we would be able to eat them. You can of course, if you are very hungry but after a hearty breakfast we weren’t able to eat more than a couple. We noticed that many of the other more experienced cookie lovers had brought tins and bags to hold their cookies.
Most of the inns have at least two different cookies for you to try and others had even more. Some also had candy. Many of them offered a drink, it could be coffee or tea, hot chocolate or hot mulled cider. Its hard imagine that you could have cookie overload but you can so be smart and bring along some sort of container.
The gingerbread houses were amazing as well. I took pictures of them so that I could fairly judge them. You are sure that you will remember them all but with there being 15 it is hard to decide which one should be first, second and third.
If you want to know all the inns that participated in 2009, the website gives you a chance to check them all out. You will be able to duplicate the cookies at home with your recipe cards. If this sounds like something that you would enjoy doing in December 2010, book early, this is a very popular event.
