Start New Holiday Traditions With These Wirecutter Picks

Top pick

Hamilton Beach Set & Forget 6 Quart Programmable Slow Cooker

The best slow cooker

The Set & Forget cooked foods low and slow, making the best pot roast in our tests, and it has a probe thermometer to cook foods to a set temperature.

Buying Options

$70 from Amazon

Countertop appliances can streamline food prep in countless ways—but a slow cooker can also evoke a sense of nostalgia, especially around the holidays.

A slow cooker became an essential part of my family’s annual Christmas brunch several years ago, after my husband received a present from his mother: her decades-old copy of Scandinavian Cooking, which contains a recipe for the Swedish mulled wine (aka glögg) that her mother used to prepare every Christmas. The tradition fell by the wayside sometime after my husband’s maternal grandmother’s passing, but we now re-create it every year after inheriting Christmas-brunch hosting duties. The glögg’s heady aroma alone was reason enough for us to bring it back.

A slow cooker is a simple device: It delivers a steady, moderate heat that makes it ideal for cooking loads of different winter-friendly soups and stews. If you’re looking to add an easy-to-make main course to your holiday menu, slow cookers are also great for preparing a pot roast, which for many people is a classic Christmas dish.

Wirecutter’s top-pick slow cooker, the Hamilton Beach Set & Forget 6 Quart Programmable Slow Cooker, produced the most succulent pot roast in our testing. And it features a locking lid, so if you’re not the host of your holiday event, transporting the cooker with a roast inside is still relatively easy; you can also plug the appliance in and serve the roast warm at your destination without having to bother your host for oven or stovetop space.

Several Wirecutter staffers go gaga for Advent calendars every fall. Whether you’re into food, beauty, coffee, tea, or toys, there’s bound to be a Wirecutter-approved Advent calendar that’ll give you and your loved ones a daily dose of tiny delight.

Though an Advent calendar may appear to offer only single-serving enjoyment, some of our favorite ways to enjoy Advent calendars involve sharing the treats.

Top pick

Bonne Maman Advent Calendar 2024 Edition

Buying Options

$52 from Amazon

$3,000 from World Market

For Wirecutter’s Annam Swanson, the Bonne Maman Advent Calendar, which contains 23 jars of the jam brand’s signature spreads and one tiny pot of honey, has precipitated a little pre-holiday fun among long-distance siblings. Each of them gets their own calendar; they then have 24 reasons to share and compare tasting notes, as the calendar typically features new, exclusive flavors (star anise and strawberry, for example, or cherry with elderflower) every year. Annam also finds that the jams are great ingredients for holiday baking.

Marilyn Ong, a supervising editor on our kitchen team, loves how a Lego Advent calendar not only gives her children 24 new mini-builds to attempt but also gives them extra morning-routine motivation on 24 pre-Christmas mornings, as she allows them to dive into that day’s build only after they’re dressed and packed for school.

Top pick

Lego City Advent Calendar 60381

Buying Options

$25 from Amazon

$50 from Walmart

Because many Advent calendars are available for a limited time—often starting as early as September until they sell out—it’s worth shopping for them long before the holiday season officially begins.

Bonus: If you love the holidays so much that you just can’t wait for them to start, purchasing an Advent calendar sometime between Labor Day and Halloween is an easy way to get in the spirit when it’s still relatively hot out.

Top pick

Wilton Ready to Build Gingerbread House Kit

Classic gingerbread house

This kit wins for the best icing consistency and color, uniform cookies that don’t leave gaps, and a range of decorating options—including fondant—for a sweet and sturdy gingerbread house.

Buying Options

$24 from Amazon

Decorating for the holidays is a long-established, big-deal tradition for my family. Several years ago, my mother-in-law expressed regret that she wasn’t able to attend that year’s tree trimming; to compensate, she came over the following week with a gingerbread house kit for her and my daughter to assemble together. From that, a new holiday tradition was born.

I’ve since learned that purchasing a quality kit is key, because there’s nothing merry, jolly, or happy about an intergenerational meltdown over crumbling cookie construction. (By the way, Wirecutter has some expert advice for avoiding gingerbread house disasters.)

In our gingerbread house kit testing, we found that the Wilton Ready to Build Gingerbread House Kit offered the sturdiest cookie pieces and the icing with the best consistency for sticking those pieces together, resulting in the most fun, least frustrating assembly. The kit also comes with plenty of extra icing and an ample, colorful assortment of candy pieces so that you and your family can festoon your creation to your hearts’ content.

Top pick

L.L.Bean Ultrasoft Comfort Flannel Sheet Set

The best flannel sheets

Consistently better than almost every set we’ve tried, these especially soft, well-made flannel sheets should keep you toasty on cold winter nights.

Buying Options

$119 from L.L.Bean
(twin)

Growing up, updates writer Sarah Gannett loved the cozy, holiday-themed sheets that her mother would swap into her family’s bed-making rotation around the end of the year. In fact, she loved them so much that she’s planning to replicate the tradition in her own home this year.

Some of her mother’s holiday sheets were made of flannel, for extra warmth on cold winter nights. Our top-pick and budget-pick flannel sheet sets (respectively, the L.L.Bean Ultrasoft Comfort Flannel Sheet Set and Target’s Threshold Flannel Sheet Set) are both available in several wintry themes and patterns—such as L.L.Bean’s silver sage/bone plaid and Target’s green-and-white tree print—and perfect for a seasonal vibe.

If you already have flannel sheets that you like, consider creating a similar tradition with a family-wide set of matching pajamas. Hanna Andersson offers long-johns-style tops and bottoms for kids and adults in thick, durable cotton with holiday-appropriate color combos that we love.

Top pick

Wilton 101-Piece Cookie Cutter Set

The best kid-friendly cookie cutters

For baking with children, simpler is better, and these plastic cutters are a little safer and easier to handle.

Buying Options

$20 from Amazon

$19 from Walmart

Give this cookie cutter set to your favorite tot this holiday season and look forward to many years of fun holiday baking to come. We’ve found the Wilton 101-Piece Cookie Cutter Set to be safer and more comfortable for kids to use than metal cutters yet capable of withstanding any abuse that little ones may put them through. (One of our young testers really enjoyed “cutting” cookie dough by smacking these cutters hard against the countertop, and everyone—and everything—survived.) And because the set contains a huge variety of holiday, animal, letter, and number pieces, you may find yourself using it to bake often over the course of a year.

Dandelion Chocolate Hot Chocolate Mix

Add milk (dairy or otherwise) to this mix to get a smooth, rich, and deeply chocolaty cup of cocoa. Each jar makes four cups.

Buying Options

$18 from Dandelion Chocolate

Toasting the holidays with a family-friendly beverage like hot cocoa can be a delight for folks of all ages—one deserving of a cocoa mix that’s a little more special than the usual supermarket brands.

On Christmas mornings, Wirecutter social video manager Katie Quinn and her family always start the day with toast and hot cocoa. Last year, they leveled up to the Dandelion Hot Chocolate Mix, a recommendation in our stocking-stuffer gift guide. Dandelion produces small-batch, single-origin chocolates and delivers the same artisanal quality in its powdered cocoa mix, which is made from Ecuadorian, single-origin cacao. As Katie said, “There’s no returning to Swiss Miss now.”

This article was edited by Alexander Aciman and Catherine Kast.