Christmas Day in Antarctica: Peterman Island, Port Charcot, and Santa by Zodiac
A Very Seabourn Christmas in Antarctica
Christmas Day started with a missed landing.
To anyone who doesn't cruise, or hasn't done an expedition cruise specifically, missing a stop probably sounds like a genuinely big deal. In this case, I didn't even realize anything had gone wrong until I went back through my own notes and the day's actual schedule while writing this post. We'd been booked to land at Pleneau Island that morning. Instead, the ship pivoted to a scenic cruise past Port Charcot, and if I hadn't checked, I would have sworn that had been the plan all along. That's expedition mode for you: the plan changes, and within a few hours you've already forgotten there was ever a different one.
Santa driving a Zodiac in Antarctica
By this point in the trip we'd already seen plenty of Gentoo penguins, but the numbers kept climbing every single day, and Port Charcot added its own crowd to the tally. It also gave us our first real seal sightings of the whole trip, hauled out and sunning themselves on the rocks and ice. I'm honestly not sure why it took this long to see one, but once we did, they started showing up everywhere.
Two seals in the foreground, while penguins run in the background
In the afternoon we landed at Peterman Island, and that's where Christmas Day actually started to feel like Christmas. Seabourn does not do the holidays quietly. Santa's elves met us out on the water, arriving by Zodiac with champagne for anyone out cruising that afternoon.
Back on the ship, there was a full Christmas lunch, and Santa made the rounds through the main dining room while everyone ate.
That evening the crew put together a full holiday show. The entertainment staff performed together first, and then some of the crew got up on stage for a traditional Filipino Christmas song they'd specifically rehearsed for the occasion. From there we rolled straight into a full crew Christmas carol sing-along, staged right on the grand staircase for a truly epic entrance into the Christmas gala dinner.
Looking back at it now, what actually stuck with me from that day is the seals and Santa’s elves bringing us champagne on a Zodiac. Not the missed landing at Pleneau, which I'd genuinely forgotten happened until I checked the schedule.
That's the magic of expedition mode. The plan changes constantly, and it all still works out as it feels like it was meant to.
