Christmas in the Bahamas doesn’t follow the rulebook. It looks nothing like the postcards — no frost on the windows, no woolly jumpers, no pine forests dusted with snow. Instead, it has its own kind of magic. Ours is a Christmas shaped around sun and sea, around friends who have quietly, inevitably become family.
Our tradition is to stay put. We gather those we love and, every year, seem to add a few more to the table. Some have been celebrating with us for more than 25 years. My parents were friends with their parents, sometimes even their grandparents. Our Christmas table is joyfully mixed — Jews, Muslims, Christians, everyone welcome. Faiths mingle, traditions collide, stories are swapped. The guest list shifts slightly year to year, but the spirit remains the same: open doors, open hearts and a faintly wild sense of celebration.
Photography by Brittan Goetz
The season begins with the tree: a real fir, shipped in by boat, arrives slightly droopy and desperately thirsty. We revive it with a long, indulgent soak before hauling it indoors, where its scent instantly transforms our tropical house. In the early years, the children were electrified by the decorating of the tree. Over time, we’ve amassed an unapologetically sentimental collection of ornaments, which they once fought to hang and now, older, approach with a little eye-rolling and theatrical patience.
Even in Caribbean heat, we honor colder-climate traditions. The stockings — grand, weighty and embroidered with each child’s name by my mother’s dressmaker in England — are hung along the chimneypiece. And still, every year, I subject my five fully grown children to the agony of a Christmas photograph beneath the inferno of dangling stockings.
My favorite indulgence is gift wrapping, where all restraint deserts me. Each year, I choose a theme: modest kraft paper and twine, fluorescent excess, or parcels hand-stamped with names. Every present is finished with a small ornament, chosen with forensic care. Conrad, our youngest son, might unwrap a comically elongated sausage dog. Captain Bob, my pickleball partner, could find a gleaming green pickle. For Linda, who has shared this island with me for decades, a tiny gold palm tree — a gilded tribute to home.
Christmas morning begins with the chaos of stockings — once opened in a tangle on our bed, now sprawled across the sitting room where limbs and paper have room to fly. A full English breakfast follows, and most years, we stop in the churchyard to visit our son Wesley’s mother. I hug Wes and remind him how loved he is.
Lunch is the grand centerpiece: a traditional English feast for about 30 people. Monumental turkey, generous stuffing, crisp potatoes, sausages wrapped in bacon, bread sauce, flaming pudding, brandy butter, mince pies — the full, glorious choir.
But the table is where the real magic happens. Pinecones for our English roots, palms for the tropics and crackers — crowns, jokes, absurd toys — because Christmas crackers demand silliness, even under blazing sun. Each year arrives dressed in a new idea: blue-and-white bowls of oranges and fir, tartan and silver, white-on-white lace and candles, or golds and corals layered with rosemary and bay. Anything with shape, scent and a story.
One year, my husband, David, asked what I wanted for Christmas. “A tent,” I said. He imagined something practical. What arrived was a Rajasthan canvas pavilion — handpainted borders, scalloped valances, block-printed stars — half palace, half traveler’s dream. We pitch it somewhere new each year and celebrate inside our wandering room.
Whether we’re lighting a fire in the heat, decorating a tree that arrived by boat or feeding 30 friends beneath the palms or a tent, Christmas here remains joyful, chaotic, exhausting — and completely full of love.
Excerpted from India Hicks: Entertaining, with a Side of Chaos by India Hicks. Published by Rizzoli New York, 2026. Photography by Brittan Goetz.
