Aman has given its festive season a name this year. Rituals of Joy runs on things guests take part in rather than things they sit through, and the clearest version of it is a ballet studio in New York before the audience is let in.
The New York offer is backstage access to George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker, and a private lesson with the dancers who are about to perform it. The ballet has opened every December at Lincoln Center since the mid-1950s, latterly at the David H. Koch Theater. Almost nobody sees the hours before the curtain.
That is the shape of the whole programme. Aman has grouped its festive itineraries three ways, Asia, the Americas and the Caribbean, Europe and North Africa, and built each one out of what the place already does in December. Performance, craft, ceremony and food are the four strands the house names.
Venice
On 2 January, Aman Venice hands its rooms to a charity concert for Coro Manos Blancas. The afternoon runs to opera and carols. The choir comes out of El Sistema in Venezuela and works in two sections, one of singers with disabilities, one of deaf and hard-of-hearing performers who render the music in Venezuelan Sign Language with their hands gloved in white.
Naybeth García founded that second section in 1999, nine years after the choir itself began. Venezuela declared it part of the national cultural heritage in 2005. It has sung in Salzburg, Los Angeles and Tokyo, and Palazzo Papadopoli will be a smaller room than any of them.
The Tiepolo Room at Aman Venice, dressed for the season · Courtesy of Aman
A choir that sings with its hands is a strange thing to put inside a palazzo. That is the reason for putting it there.
The Splendid EditElsewhere
Amanjiwo runs a New Year’s Eve journey that opens with ritual and a feast at Borobudur and closes the following morning with reflections on the bank of the Progo. Amankora holds an archery competition at its Punakha lodge, archery being Bhutan’s national sport, then plants trees with the village.
Amanbagh brings back its camel polo on New Year’s Day, played to dhol drums with chai on the sidelines. Aman Le Mélézin keeps Christmas Day on the heated bar terrace at Courchevel 1850, hot chocolate and vin chaud around the braseros, skiing afterwards. Amangiri sends guests out under the Utah sky with s’mores and the astronomer Rich Csenge.
None of it is new to the places themselves. Camel polo, archery and the walk up to Borobudur happen whether or not a hotel sells tickets. What the house is selling is the seat.
At sea
Amangati, the first ship Aman has built, carries 47 suites and opened for reservations this autumn. Its inaugural season runs in the Mediterranean, and the Caribbean follows in autumn 2027. The first festive journey aboard belongs to that second season.
The gift card, for anyone who would rather not choose, is redeemable across thirty-six destinations.
Programme structure, the festive highlights and the Amangati sailing dates from Aman’s own festive season and New & Noteworthy pages, accessed 22 October 2026. Background on Coro Manos Blancas from the choir’s published history through El Sistema and the Dudamel Foundation.
Photography courtesy of Aman — © Aman