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Guides
Where to catch A Christmas Carol in Boston, starting at the hotel where Dickens first read it in America
Boston banned Christmas from 1659 to 1681. Less than two centuries later, it was the first American city to hear Charles Dickens read A Christmas Carol. According to the Omni Parker House’s history, Dickens gave his first American reading of the story privately at the Parker House in 1867, then read it publicly at the Tremont Theatre, and WBUR dates the start of that reading tour to Dec. 2, 1867, in Boston. The hotel still has the mirror he used to practice his reading, and the original door to his suite came back in 2015 and is on display in its History Gallery. This year you can hear the story in that hotel, see it on stage with the voice of PBS’s Frontline as Scrooge, watch the Muppets do it with the Boston Pops, and finish with a toast at taverns that were pouring before Dickens was born. The hotel’s historic Press Room hosts A Christmas Carol readings on Saturday, Dec. 19 at 7 PM and Sunday, Dec. 20 at 2 PM and 5:30 PM. Veteran actor Johnny Kinsman reads the story while vocalist Ann Moss and multi-instrumentalist Justin Ouellet weave in carol tunes and foley sound effects, and Parker House historian Susan Wilson opens with the story of Dickens and the hotel. The show is for ages 6 and up, and refunds are available up to seven days before. That Press Room has its own history, too. The hotel’s timeline says a six-year-old John F. Kennedy gave his “first public speech” there in 1923, and he held his bachelor party in the same room in 1953. The Omni Parker House is running two holiday pop-up bars this season, according to the reading’s event page. Ebenezer’s Bar at Parker’s Bar leans into the darker, Dickens side of the season, and Blitzen’s at The Last Hurrah goes merry and bright. Blitzen’s opens Friday, Nov. 27 and pours daily from 4 PM to midnight, with cocktail recipes from Julie Reiner, a co-founder of New York’s Clover Club and a judge on Netflix’s Drink Masters. The Last Hurrah takes its name from the 1956 novel inspired by James Michael Curley, who was a Parker House regular. Parker’s Restaurant has its own claims to fame. The hotel says the Boston cream pie and Parker House rolls came out of Parker’s after French chef Augustine Anezin was hired to open it in 1865, and JFK proposed to Jacqueline Bouvier at table 40 in Parker’s Restaurant in 1953. Commonwealth Shakespeare Company’s Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol runs Friday, Dec. 11 through Sunday, Dec. 20 at the Emerson Cutler Majestic Theatre, with Will Lyman, the longtime narrator of PBS’s Frontline, as Scrooge. Steve Wargo’s adaptation is full of 19th-century carols arranged by Dianne Adams McDowell, the vocal arranger for Broadway’s A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder, and Steven Maler directs. Every performance is open captioned. The Saturday, Dec. 19 evening show and the Sunday, Dec. 20 matinee are ASL-interpreted, and the show runs about two hours with one intermission. Students can get $25 rush tickets in person at the box office starting two hours before curtain, and groups of 10 or more save 10%. WBUR has hosted a reading of A Christmas Carol every year since 2002. This year’s is Thursday, Dec. 17 at 7 PM at CitySpace, 890 Commonwealth Ave., with doors at 6 PM. Steve Brown, Meghna Chakrabarti, Tiziana Dearing, Ben Brock Johnson and Robin Young read, The Mistletones sing, and there are cookies and hot cocoa at intermission. Ticket sales support Rosie’s Place, which opened in 1974 as the first women’s shelter in the United States. Disney’s The Muppet Christmas Carol in Concert plays Symphony Hall on Sunday, Dec. 27 and Monday, Dec. 28, both at 2 PM, with the Boston Pops and conductor Lawrence Loh. Michael Caine is Scrooge, Kermit is Bob Cratchit, and Gonzo narrates as Dickens with help from Rizzo the Rat. The songs are by Paul Williams, who also wrote “Rainbow Connection.” For a spookier night, Massachusetts Poet Laureate Regie Gibson reads two Victorian Christmas ghost stories at Old North Church on Saturday, Dec. 12 from 7:30 to 8:30 PM. One is Dickens’s The Goblins Who Stole a Sexton, which the church calls a sinister precursor to A Christmas Carol. The other is A.M. Burrage’s Smee, where a Christmas Eve game of hide-and-seek in a dark mansion goes very wrong. Josiah Reibstein leads an ensemble playing a live original score. Everyone sits in the church’s box pews. A single ticket is $36, and private pews are $100 for three, $130 for four or $160 for five. For $12 more, a 20-minute crypt tour at 6:30 PM takes you beneath the floorboards to 37 brick tombs holding the remains of 1,100 early Bostonians. Three of the city’s oldest drinking and dining spots sit within a block of each other near Creek Square, according to the Historical Marker Database, a short walk from the Parker House. The Bell in Hand was founded in 1795 by Jimmy Wilson, the city’s last known town crier, and its marker says the only time it ever closed was Prohibition, from 1920 to 1933. Women were not allowed in until the late 1960s, and in the early days last call was 9 PM and the last round was on the house. Union Oyster House has served food since 1826 and calls itself America’s oldest restaurant. Daniel Webster was a constant customer at its oyster bar. Around the corner, The Green Dragon Tavern carries the name of the tavern established in 1654 where, its site says, plans for the march on Lexington and Concord were overheard. Across the river in Charlestown, Warren Tavern dates to 1780, calls itself the oldest tavern in Massachusetts and says it once welcomed George Washington and Paul Revere.
5 apple-picking trips near Boston made for adults
Stay for hard cider, beer, or a meal once the bag is full. Apple picking is better when filling the bag is only the first part of the plan. These farms pair the usual fall activity with hard cider, beer, wine, good food, or somewhere worth staying after you have gathered far more apples than any household needs. None of these orchards is adults-only. Children will still be present. The difference is that each place gives adults something to do besides supervise a bag of Honeycrisps and pretend the corn maze was their idea. Belkin Family Lookout Farm has its own brewery, cidery, and year-round taproom, and it sits only 17 miles from Boston. That makes it the easiest option when you want apple picking near Boston without handing the whole day to Route 2. The South Natick farm grows apples and Asian pears and produces its own hard cider and beer. After picking, go to the Taproom for drinks and farm barbecue, or eat outside at The Lookout while it is open for the season. The current menu runs burgers, barbecue, shareable plates, and an apple cider donut ice cream sandwich that undoes the orchard walk fairly quickly. U-pick admission is required to enter the orchard, and outside food and drinks are not allowed. Check the current picking schedule and Taproom hours before you leave. The orchard and dining areas keep different schedules. Carlson Orchards pours cider beside the trees that produced it. The 100-acre farm in Harvard grows more than 20 apple varieties and runs a Cider Barn serving drinks made from its own fruit. Pick-your-own runs daily during apple season, but the Cider Barn opens Friday through Sunday. Plan for that. Going on a Tuesday and finding the cider half of the trip closed would be a needlessly wholesome outcome. The Cider Barn serves several house-made hard ciders, including bottles made with heirloom American and European cider apples. The retail store has sweet cider, baked goods, and fruit for anyone who wants apples without removing them from a tree. Carlson asks visitors to check daily updates before coming because available varieties change through the season. Pets are not allowed in the orchard. Nashoba Valley Winery turns apple picking into lunch and drinks. The Bolton property stacks an orchard, winery, brewery, distillery, tasting room, outdoor dining, and restaurant on one hill. It is less a quick pick stop than a full schedule. Start in the orchard and buy bags before you pick. Once the apples are handled, the tasting room offers wine, beer, cider, and spirits produced on the farm. The outdoor Knoll serves lunch and drinks. J’s Restaurant covers the more formal version of the day with dinner and Sunday brunch. Weekend winery tours include tastings for guests 21 and older; reservations help. Restaurant service, tastings, tours, and orchard access have separate hours, so decide which parts matter before you go. Otherwise you can finish picking just as the thing you actually drove to Bolton for stops serving. Cider Hill Farm in Amesbury is strongest on a Friday afternoon. The farm has apple picking, a bakery, a farm store, hard cider, food trucks, and cider donuts that often become the point of the trip. The smartest adult move is one of the farm’s Fall Fridays. The 2026 series runs Friday afternoons through October 23, with apple picking, hard cider, guest food trucks, and live music. It is a better use of Friday than sitting in traffic at 5:15 while insisting you left work early. Picking tickets are sold by bag size, and the orchard has moderate inclines and uneven ground. Tickets may be available on arrival, but buying them before the trip removes one possible disappointment. Leave the dog home. Pets are not allowed on the farm. Red Apple Farm in Phillipston is the farthest trip on this list, and it also gives you the most reasons not to turn around right after picking. The farm grows more than the standard supermarket lineup, with varieties ripening from late July through October. September brings McIntosh, Honeycrisp, Macoun, Cortland, Empire, and several harder-to-find apples. The exact selection depends on the harvest, so call before driving if you have one particular apple in mind. After the orchard, the farm has its own Cidery and the Brew Barn, a restaurant and taproom serving local beer, Red Apple Farm hard cider, and barbecue. Live music is part of the schedule. That is enough to make the long drive a fall day trip instead of a grocery errand with better scenery. Picking conditions can change quickly. The farm recommends calling to confirm what is available that day. Check three things before leaving: what apples are available, when the orchard stops admitting pickers, and when alcohol service begins. Those hours are rarely identical. Pick first. Most orchards close their fields before their bars, restaurants, or taprooms stop serving, and nobody has improved an apple-picking trip by arriving after the orchard gate shuts.
Get to know Boston
Order a milkshake in Boston and you might be missing the ice cream
Order a milkshake in Boston at a shop that still keeps the old distinction and you can get exactly what you asked for: milk and flavoring, beaten until it foams. No ice cream. The thicker drink, the one visitors usually mean, is a frappe. Not every counter still bothers. Plenty of menus now use milkshake the way the rest of the country does. The shops that list both drinks are not offering two sizes of the same thing. Those are the last places where a milkshake in Boston and a frappe are different orders. What goes into a milkshake in Boston The traditional local milkshake is milk plus a flavoring, often chocolate syrup, shaken or blended until air gets into it. A frappe adds ice cream. Yankee’s account of the two drinks is useful on a point people skip: the milkshake is not a glass of chocolate milk. Stirring syrup into milk mixes the ingredients. Blending them is what makes it a fountain order. If a menu lists both, look at the prices before treating the cheaper one as a deal. You may be comparing a milk drink with one that has scoops in it. Say “frap” The regional drink is one syllable, rhyming with map. The American Heritage Dictionary records that pronunciation and treats the noun as regional usage, mapping it to Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts. Shops in Boston still put it on the board. That entry is a different word from “frappé,” two syllables, which the same dictionary defines as a frozen fruit dessert or a drink poured over shaved ice. The spelling overlap is how visitors end up performing French at a Jamaica Plain counter. A shop owner paid for the lesson Vincent Petryk, who later opened JP Licks, learned the difference as a newcomer from Philadelphia. Boston.com reported that he ordered a milkshake at Bailey’s in the 1970s, saw that it cost half as much as the frappe, and then asked where the ice cream was. Bailey’s is gone. The mix-up is not. The same report found “frappe” in late-nineteenth-century Boston Globe pages attached to chilled and partly frozen drinks, including alcoholic ones, long before it settled on the ice-cream version. Recipes a few years later included cafe frappes and pineapple frappes, sometimes with a scoop of ice cream already in the mix. Boston University food scholars told the paper that regional names for ordinary foods were common before national food media flattened the vocabulary. Megan Elias, who directs BU’s gastronomy program, pointed to a 1920s overlap: Prohibition pushed people toward new places to sit, and electric equipment made ice cream cheaper to produce in volume. Soda fountains did well in that gap. The scholars also said the exact reason this particular word stuck here is not established. There is no inventor to toast and no afternoon when Boston renamed the milkshake. The term showed up in more than one drink, attached itself to the ice-cream one, and stayed. The word is still on the menu JP Licks still lists a regular frappe, an extra-thick frappe, and an espresso frappe, separate from smoothies, frozen coffee, ice-cream sodas, and floats. Extra-thick is a texture, not a citizenship test. In 2023, Mark Parrish, president of Crescent Ridge Dairy in Sharon, told Boston.com his shop still served the ice-cream-free milkshake next to the frappe and asked customers which they wanted. He also said tourists, students, and younger customers increasingly ask for a milkshake. Other counters have given up and will put ice cream in whatever you called it. Rhode Island complicates the map again. In parts of that state, and into southeastern Massachusetts, the ice-cream drink is a cabinet. Same general idea. Different word. This is the same class of local vocabulary as why Bostonians say “wicked.” Get the word wrong and you can still have a conversation. Get this one wrong and you may drink a glass of flavored milk. If the menu says milkshake and you want ice cream in it, ask. You do not need to win the regional argument first.
Weird, Boston squares are almost never squares
Copley Square used to be triangular. Kenmore Square is a pile-up of roads. A small intersection with a memorial sign can be a square too. Boston squares have a lot in common. A reliable shape is not one of those things. The name usually tells you what a place does. People meet there, roads come together there, businesses cluster there, or someone is remembered there. It does not promise four equal sides. If you expect every square to look like an enclosed plaza, you will keep looking for a plaza that was never part of the plan. Some squares also name more than the space in the middle. Tell someone you are meeting in Kenmore and you have named a destination. You have not told them where to stand. Boston squares are places before they’re shapes The city’s Complete Streets guidelines treat streets as public space for people walking, biking, taking transit, and driving. Squares make those competing jobs obvious. Someone wants to cross. Someone wants a bus. Someone wants to sit down without being in either person’s way. A square can be a destination and a route through somewhere else. That is why Boston squares do not always come with a lawn. The meeting point may be the intersection itself, with useful places on the edges. The histories of individual squares are more useful than one origin story for all of them. Copley and Kenmore got to their present forms by different routes. So did a lot of Boston’s streets. Copley really was a triangle According to the city’s landmark report for the Boston Public Library, Copley Square began as a triangular lot at Huntington Avenue, Dartmouth Street, and Boylston Street. Boston bought that parcel in 1883. It bought a second triangle two years later. Huntington Avenue ran between them. The road stayed there until 1968, so the awkward geometry was not a drafting error that lasted a season. Sasaki, which won a 1960s design competition, describes that first park as a shift from a grassy triangle bordered by traffic to a civic plaza next to Trinity Church. A later redesign brought the space level with the sidewalks. A renovation the city marked as complete in 2026 added accessible paths, shaded seating, and work on the fountain. The name survived all of it. A square can keep its identity while the ground plan changes. Kenmore grew around movement Boston University’s history of Kenmore Square describes a commercial crossroads shaped by transport and hotels. Beacon Street and Commonwealth Avenue meet there. Trolleys and nearby railroads brought people who needed a place to stay. The area was called Governor’s Square before the Kenmore name stuck. The Hotel Kenmore supplied the later name. Hotels, automobile businesses, and the crowds heading to Fenway defined the place, not a formal garden or an enclosed court. That history is a useful check on the idea that every square began as a sitting room someone designed on purpose. Kenmore’s job was getting people somewhere. The identity followed the traffic. Some squares are memorials Boston’s Hero Squares program is even blunter about shape. A Hero Square is a square or intersection dedicated to a service member killed in action. The city says the first one, Dewey Square at South Station, was named in 1898. More than 1,200 have been dedicated since. You do not need a park, a fountain, or four surrounding buildings. Families can apply. Veterans Services works with Transportation and Public Works on the placards. There is a searchable database. The gold star on the sign is reserved for those killed in action. Next time you pass a square that seems to consist of a sign and a crosswalk, read the name. You may be at a memorial, not at a failed attempt to build a plaza.