For their second holiday season, throughout December The National Willa Cather Center will be offering guided holiday tours on Saturdays, beginning with December 7, which is also Willa Cather’s birthday! This year’s tour will specifically focus on the many seasonal winter and Christmas details described in My Ántonia—at the very same places that inspired locations in Cather's most beloved novel! 

Several historic sites will be decorated for the season and readings will enliven and bring to life holiday and winter scenes from the novel in restored historic sites—Burlington Depot, J. L. Miner House, St. Juliana Falconieri, and the Pavelka Farmstead—during a cherished time of the year.

"By the time we had placed the cold, fresh-smelling little tree in a corner of the sitting-room, it was already Christmas Eve. After supper we all gathered there, and even grandfather, reading his paper by the table, looked up with friendly interest now and then. The cedar was about five feet high and very shapely. We hung it with the gingerbread animals, strings of popcorn, and bits of candle which Fuchs had fitted into pasteboard sockets. Its real splendours, however, came from the most unlikely place in the world—from Otto’s cowboy trunk..."  

— My Ántonia

Book soon as tours are likely to sell-out!  Click here to find the booking link. 

This tour is a seasonal modification of the Cather Foundation's special Ántonia's Black Hawk Tour that we are offering on Saturdays through March 29 as part of our National Endowment for the Arts Big Read of My Ántonia programs and initiatives.