Twenty years ago, skiers from round the world seeking bountiful snow and an iconic Christmas rarely had to look beyond Europe. Chalets stood knee-deep in wintry powder and the skiing was good. Today, finding reliable Christmas snow in the Swiss or French Alps is like a game of resort roulette. In the American northeast the position is hardly any better. Vermont may occasionally offer the chocolate-box-cover landscape of lore, but frostbite-inducing lift queues and a reliance on machine-manufactured snow are more realistic scenarios.
For skiers searching for that heady brew of terrific snow and seasonal festivity, hope is not lost. The first autumnal snow has already dusted the Rockies and a number of resorts here offer an experience as good as that of the Alps, but one that is uniquely North American.
One Christmas cracker is Park City (2,100 to 3,000 metres), the Utah resort that hosted several events at the 2002 Winter Olympics and is home to the US national ski team. Located in the Wasatch mountain range, Park City is a small town whose origins date from a 19th-century silver find. Later, when silver prices dropped, the town was saved from obsolescence by the arrival of winter sports. Today, it's a spruced-up version of its former self, but the main street has retained a pioneer-town feeling and a sense of history. Pad along the street during a snowfall and you may have little urge to be elsewhere.
Park City has a wide range of groomed runs that will massage any intermediate's ego, but there are also back bowls where experts can cavort. Those who want to test themselves can take a short drive to Alta (2,600 to 3,200 metres) for a day.
To the west, in Colorado, is Steamboat Springs (2,100 to 3,200 metres), a Rocky Mountain resort that combines a broad range of skiing terrain with a distinct heritage. Long a hub for the local ranch population, residents of this Yampa Valley town still measure snowfall by how far it extends up fence posts. The ranch mentality permeates the resort, where cowboy hats are as abundant as ski boots. What makes Steamboat doubly attractive is its enviable December snowfall record. Last year, more than 1.5 metres of powder fell in the first week of December, setting up perfect conditions for later in the month.
This Christmas, the Steamboat Grand Resort Hotel is offering sleigh rides, carols and a visit from Santa. Better yet, the red-suited one - or one of his many facsimiles - is anticipated to be carving the powder on the 25th.
Another resort where Christmas is celebrated with as much fervour as the skiing is central Idaho's Sun Valley (1,750 to 2,790 metres). The resort was founded in the mid-1930s after Union Pacific Railroad chairman William Averell Harriman recruited an Austrian nobleman, Count Felix Schaffgotsch, to find a location for a ski destination the equal of any in Europe. He clearly succeeded: within a few years of its founding, Sun Valley had seduced Hollywood's leading lights as well as continental royalty. Arguably its most venerable patron was Ernest Hemingway, who resided in nearby Ketchum and revelled in its mountains and the 'high blue windless skies'.