Let someone else do the turkey – hotel accommodation this Christmas

Can not face cooking or the invasion of rellies? Hole in a hotel instead. It will be your best gift ever. London Charlotte Street Hotel is a chic boutique option, or try more rural festive hospitality

Last Christmas, you'll recall, was brutal, fabulous cold. A real winter that lakes, ponds and lakes turned into skating rinks, people in woolen bundles and the crystalline sky. Work commitments meant I could not leave my family to London to close in a house on the shores of Loch Maree in the northwest of Scotland where the snow lay deep and the temperature dropped to-16C. Instead, my wife and I in the Charlotte Street Hotel.

On Christmas Day I spoke to my brothers and sisters. "I am sorry not to be there," I said. "But on the upside our bathroom has its own steam." There was a long silence. A brother finally replied. "Great! The only steam I can see is when I breathe out. "

There are many reasons to yourself adrift on this most alien time of year. It happened to me. My second worst Christmas in Washington DC where I was trapped alone in an apartment with no furniture or food, store, Terry's Chocolate Orange my sister-in-law had kindly sent. After I devoured, I collapsed with a massive allergic reaction. My worst Christmas was in Zaire during the 1996 war, when I was caught in the jungle between the disturbed and terrified Zairean army and the approaching Rwandans. That was … what is the right word? Oh, shit.

Finding myself in the Charlotte Street Hotel with my wife was the opposite. It was luxurious, safe, friendly, delicious, and a romantic adventure in a way that a stay in a hotel so rarely is. Since Christmas everything is different. It is ever so slightly surreal.

The hotel is owned by Dale Firm, which has a wonderful line of boutique hotels in London – including the Covent Garden Hotel and the Soho Hotel – and now in New York, with the Crosby Street Hotel.

The Charlotte Street Hotel looks nice from the outside, with striped awnings, flags, and in summer, tables on the street. This facade, and low, rich lighting, feels warm in the winter. We checked on Christmas Eve, the staff told us they would be with us all the way through to Boxing Day. Immediately I felt a little less formal than usual, as if we were all on a boat, somehow adrift.

The hotel was almost empty and we were to stay in the penthouse. That happy Alison. There was a couch, a TV we could only dream of owning a large bed, oh the decadence, even the steamy bathroom had its own television. Best of all was that the windows looked out over the roof and London in the middle was the BT Tower, with its large liquid display shows smiling snowflakes dancing through the night.

That night we drank cocktails at the long zinc bar of the hotel, the Christmas atmosphere of the bartender almost a member of the family. We bumped into people we knew in town for one last bit of shopping, and who were in a festive, relaxed mood. Come 11pm, and fortified with alcohol, we glided around the corner for the midnight mass at All Saints, Margaret Street, an explosion of a gothic revival church. When I told a friend of my plan that he guffawed despite the fact that most high Anglican I know. "That's the campest church in Christendom," he said.

And it's real. The story goes that the conductor had a complaint with the Minister because his singers were aspirated into the industrial quantities of incense thrown around. The minister knew Alison was due to a painting made for the memorial chapel of a sister church in Edinburgh. Again, it felt familiar, despite our mostly non-religious ways. We walked 10 minutes back through the frozen streets full of goodwill.

Christmas in London feels at one of those disaster movies where everyone is gone. The streets are deserted. The hotel sent breakfast to our room, quietly began preparing lunch. We are persuaded by our hunger to build. There is a picture of me in Soho, in the middle of a road at another day to live life, but is empty. Alison says I look like I own the place.

We continued to go to Waterloo Bridge, London has the greatest view, the full realization of the generations of the city built up and down river. And then another change and down for Christmas lunch. And now, suddenly, the hotel was full. Of the streets around people had descended on Charlotte Street in the dining room table a family celebration or any bickering, couples laugh and fight and wearing hats and brilliant man.

Curiously, at this moment I felt a bit sad. I thought of the lunch, there was in the north. My parents died before I was 21 and I am so close to my brothers and sisters. Even in the most arctic conditions, ultimately it is with them that I want, or else with my in-laws, who were in a house overlooking the Firth of Clyde. But sometimes that is not possible (and even undesirable for some people), and the Charlotte Street Hotel offered the best alternative conceivable.

Come evening, the bar was empty, apart from Kevin Daum, a U.S. self-help guru who was in London researching a book. We talked a while and he showed us a tattoo on his chest, which read in reflection, "New York Times Best Seller". Perfectly illustrates the sense of the surreal, he told us that it was that every morning he could remember of his ambition when he shaved in the mirror.

We left Kevin and slipped into a private lounge of the hotel, making us drinks from the honesty bar. The paintings in this room are real and very well Bloomsbury Group. My wife recognized originals by the will of Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. We finally returned to the bedroom and fell asleep with the snowflakes dancing outside the window, with the wrapping paper still on the bed.

The next morning I quietly dressed for work. As I let myself out, Alison was still asleep, but smiling.

• From December 19 to 30 doubles at the Charlotte Street Hotel (020-7806 2000, firmdalehotels.com) costs £ 258 per night. Christmas Day Lunch costs € 95pp

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Submited at Saturday, December 4th, 2010 at 10:01 am on Restaurant by ethan
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