Five Festivals, Ten Weeks, One Very Long Table

Spring is the smart family’s convening season. Between 6 February and 15 April 2027, five festivals arrive on the calendar, each one a ready-made reason to pull fourteen chairs around one table. Start the group chat tonight.

You think the big family trip belongs to the last week of December. I understand the instinct. December has the tree, the school holidays, the cousin who flies in from Toronto. It also has every other family on earth reaching for the same suite in the same week, at the rate the hotel has been patiently waiting all year to charge.

Spring has room.

Here is the calendar. Lunar New Year falls on Saturday 6 February. Eid al-Fitr lands on 9 or 10 March, as the moon decides. Holi colours the morning of Monday 22 March. Easter Sunday is 28 March. Songkran runs 13 to 15 April. Five celebrations in roughly ten weeks, arriving while the best tables are still yours to choose.

The case rests on three things.

First, meaning. Every gathering needs a centre. Fourteen people flown across the world for “a holiday” will splinter by day three: the spa contingent, the golf contingent, the teenagers who found the Wi-Fi password. Anchor the trip to a festival, one that belongs to your family or one you borrow with real respect, and the days arrange themselves around a moment everyone came for. There is a dinner nobody skips. There is a ritual the youngest can perform for the oldest. An Eid lunch, a reunion dinner, a morning of colour. The shape is the same.

The festival is the excuse. The grandmother is the reason.

Second, service. Everyone knows what the last week of December costs, and how many nights the hotel insists you stay for the privilege. Arrive in the second week of March instead and the general manager walks your party to the table himself. By the second evening he knows which uncle takes his coffee black. By next year it is written down. In March, fourteen of you are the occasion. In December you are one more name on a very long list.

Third, pairing. The 2027 calendar lets a family stack celebrations. Holi and Easter sit six days apart, close enough for one trip with two centres of gravity. Families who mark both, take note. So do families who simply enjoy a long lunch.

Now the scenes.

Hong Kong, the night of 5 February. Lunar New Year’s Eve is the reunion dinner, and the reunion dinner wants a room with a door. Take one of the seven private dining rooms at The Legacy House, on the fifth floor of Rosewood Hong Kong, each with its own bar and seating up to sixteen. Chef Li Chi Wai cooks Shunde, the most exacting school of Cantonese cooking. Order the poon choi, the layered basin of abalone, dried seafood and braised meats that is built for sharing and impossible to eat politely. The restaurant itself is a granddaughter’s homage to Cheng Yu-tung, patriarch of the family behind Rosewood. Your family’s reunion dinner, inside another family’s tribute to its grandfather. The symmetry does half the toast for you.

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Tuscany, 22 March. Take the whole estate. A private villa in the Val d’Orcia outside Montalcino, the kind with a cypress drive and a lawn long enough for the cousins to sprint the length of it with fistfuls of gulal. Order natural, skin-safe colours weeks ahead and ask the kitchen to make thandai with Tuscan almonds. The estate staff will be baffled for ten minutes and delighted for the rest of the day. Pack white linen you never intend to wear again.

Then drive south. Six days later, Easter at Masseria Torre Maizza, Rocco Forte’s restored sixteenth-century farmhouse at Savelletri di Fasano in Puglia, built around a watchtower that once kept watch for Ottoman raiders. Olga Polizzi did the interiors. The masseria has form with this holiday, having dressed itself in coloured eggs for Easter lunch and an Easter Monday brunch in past seasons. Put the grandparents in the newer Borgo degli Ulivi suites, among the olive trees and well away from the pool. Colour on Monday, lamb on Sunday. One family, one week, two kinds of joy.

Phuket, 13 April. Songkran has a public face, the water fights roaring down the Patong strip, and a private one. The private one is rod nam dam hua: the young pour scented water over the hands of their elders and ask for a blessing on the year ahead. At Rosewood Phuket on Emerald Bay, ask the team to set it on a pavilion at dawn, before the heat arrives. Watch a seventeen-year-old who has not voluntarily held anyone’s hand since primary school kneel in front of his grandfather. Then release him to soak his sisters. Both halves of the festival count.

Lord Howe Island, late March. For the family that wants the last of the southern summer, Baillie Lodges’ Capella Lodge sits above Lovers Bay beneath Mount Gower and Mount Lidgbird, a short flight from Sydney. Nine suites. Take all of them. The island caps its visitor numbers, the lodge welcomes children from age ten, and the menu turns daily on whatever kingfish came in. Nobody else can overbook an island that limits who lands on it.

That is privacy as a logistical fact.

Every autumn, someone at World Travel Magazine asks me where to take the whole family in December. Lately my answer arrives with a different month attached, and nobody has yet come back disappointed.

Christmas stays lovely for those who love it. Keep the tree, the carols, the plum cake, the cousin from Toronto. The argument here is narrower and more useful: the one gathering that matters most deserves a season with the room, the staff and the reason to hold it properly. That season starts in February.

I’ll be home for Christmas, as it happens. My mother insists. We’ll spend the entire dinner planning April. ◼

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© This article was first published in Nov-Dec-Jan 2027 edition of World Travel Magazine.