East Magazine

Bookmark this page! It’s our specially curated compendium of the most festive holiday happenings from now ’til New Year’s Eve.

A shopping list of party essentials, for a kick-up-your-heels New Year's Eve.

It’s super-easy to make surprise-filled, party-popping holiday noisemakers for your festive table — stuffed with paper crowns, a joke or riddle, and all sorts of trinkets. Here’s a how-to.

There’s a letter in a box in a garage in Sedona that may one day soon find its way to the Montauk Point Lighthouse Museum and, if and when it does, it will tie together disparate historical strands of a long-ago romantic tale involving a man, a woman, a horse-drawn sleigh, and a wild ride through the snow from Montauk to East Hampton.

It’s snowing peppery flakes this winter, as chefs make the most of hot-chile recipes for cold weather.

Need a party cake or fancy pie? Look no further than Dorothy’s Baking Company of Sag Harbor — the stuff sugarplum dreams are made of.

Gingerbread is the quintessential Christmas treat, but when mom is a Scandinavian baker and dad is a gifted painter, cookies are elevated to an art form. Nina Dohanos looks back on childhood holidays — and divulges some family secrets for better baking.

The recipe here is for a sturdy, spicy, and very crisp cookie. It holds up well, and will not get soggy or stale. Follow the directions as written, practice your rolling, and make sure you have a good, airtight container. Don’t skip the dot of blue coloring in the glaze, and if you want to hang them, make the hole in the dough with a toothpick before baking. This cookie recipe can also be used to make gingerbread houses.

From Steven Amaral, proprietor and chef at North Fork Chocolate Company, comes this take on spicy hot chocolate.

Eight adults gather around a dining table in Southampton, early evening, early summer. It isn’t a book club, but the group uses one as its guide: 2040: A Handbook for the Regeneration by the Australian author Damon Gameau, based on a documentary of the same name.

Mind Offline has a wide assortment of clothing, crafts, and yarn for knitting, as well as a soothing and welcoming atmosphere in this online-heavy world we live in. Recently, the shop embarked on a journey to produce yarns and hand-knit garments in the most close-looped, eco-friendly system possible: sourcing, milling, and producing fibers no more than 300 miles from the store. The result is Local Wool Co., and it’s fast becoming a vital element of Mind Offline’s offerings.

Before there were free electric-buggy rides offering ice-cold mineral waters on your way to Main Beach — before the instant chill of ducking into a brisk Ralph Lauren boutique to escape the blazing rays, before anyone had ever heard the words “climate change”  — there were ice houses.