Happy New Year’s Eve-Eve, everyone! I hope you had a wonderful holiday filled with fun festivities, delicious food, and time spent with family and friends. My holiday season has been filled with lots of holly jolly activities: from the Distillery Winter Village to the Niemi Christmas Market, Casa Loma’s Holiday Lights Tour to Canada’s Wonderland Winterfest, it’s been a busy and fun-filled month! (Check out my latest Instagram reel for some favourite festive highlights.) One of my very favourite things we did this December? A road trip to the beautiful town of Stratford!
When it comes to magical Ontario holiday towns, Stratford is right up there with St. Jacobs, Elora and Niagara-on-the-Lake. From a splurge-worthy Christmas shopping trail to a dazzling light festival, Stratford is well-known for its Christmas spirit. With its historic architecture and quaint small-town charm, Stratford looks like it’s straight out of a Hallmark holiday movie. We had the best time exploring, and I can’t wait to share my favourite finds with you all!
Stratford is about a 1.5 hour drive from our home town of Burlington. On this day, we were riding in style in the 2024 Ford F-150 Lightning! We had the pleasure of taking this fully electric pickup truck – “a digital truck for a digital age” – for an extended test drive over the weekend. The F-150 Lightning is sleek, spacious and roomy. It seats up to five, and has tons of storage.
The F-150 Lightning has an easy-to-navigate 15.5″ touchscreen, 9.6 kW of Pro Power Onboard, and no fewer than 11 outlets. Its state-of-the-art technology includes several advanced safety features, a smart entertainment system (including in-car karaoke!) and hands-free highway driving via Ford BlueCruise. I loved driving it, and felt so comfortable and safe – even as we got caught driving through a snowstorm! I love that the F-150 Lightning is fully electric, with a range of up to 500 kilometers. With a full charge, it took us all the way to Stratford, beyond and back with several kilometers to spare. (And if you need to charge enroute, it’s no problem: with access to the largest public charging network in North America, the touchscreen will show you all the nearest charging locations.)
With our fully charged truck, we only required one fuel stop: to Picard’s Peanuts (the Morriston location) to pick up some road trip snacks! Picard’s is a must on any road trip (I’ve been known to plan our routes around the closest Picard’s.) We picked up several snacks for the road: sour cream and onion chip nuts, spicy BBQ chip seeds, cinnamon cookie nuts, chocolate-covered chip nuts, and Bavarian beer nuts (hey, we like to have options!)
As much as I love those chip nuts, they’re not exactly a balanced breakfast, so our next stop was The Wild Hog Country Market for coffee and croissants. This bustling market is located in Perth East, just a 10-minute drive from downtown Stratford. They sell farm-fresh local produce, meats, cheeses, honeys, jams, freshly baked bread and pastries, and much more! They also have a fabulous selection of home decor.
We lined up at their in-house café, which serves a wide variety of coffee and tea drinks along with breakfast pastries, desserts, and deli sandwiches served on house-baked bread. We ordered lattes (maple and honey lavender) and two croissants (almond and plain.) The croissants are HUGE and so delicious – and they definitely don’t skimp on the almonds! Upstairs, there’s a small seating area that overlooks the market, decorated beautifully with antique Victorian furniture. It was the perfect spot to sit and enjoy our treats.
After breakfast, we popped into The Bruce Hotel to check out their German Holiday Market. Situated on a six-acre property in the heart of Stratford, this CAA five-diamond boutique hotel is famous for their beautifully designed suites, luxury amenities and farm-to-table restaurant. Their quaint holiday market featured local vendors selling everything from fresh wreaths to dried flowers to handcrafted beeswax ornaments. We browsed the various booths, picked up some delicious matcha honey from Huckleberry Hives, and admired the hotel’s epic annual gingerbread house.
Then we continued our journey into downtown Stratford! As I mentioned earlier, Stratford is one of Ontario’s prettiest Christmas towns (and truly just one of our prettiest towns in general.) The Avon River runs throughout its midst and is a beautiful place for a stroll – especially when you happen to be blessed with a winter wonderland like this one!
The town of Stratford was settled in the 1830s by Irish, Scottish and German immigrants, and its rich history and European heritage is reflected in its architecture. Two particularly beautiful buildings of note: Stratford City Hall (built in 1898) and the Perth County Courthouse (1887).
After taking in the sights of Stratford, it was time for some retail therapy. The town has so many shops, each cuter and more charming than the next. They’re known for their Christmas Trail: this self-guided shopping tour costs $39.55 (tax-inclusive) and includes six vouchers, which you can redeem for holiday items at any six participating shops of your choice. It’s a fun way to turn your holiday shopping into a cute little adventure! There are so many fabulous shops in Stratford that I couldn’t begin to list them all, but some of my favourites include…
Bradshaws for gorgeous clothing (check out those not-so-ugly Christmas sweaters!) jewelry, stationery, kitchenware and home decor. This store is huge and was beautifully decorated for Christmas – we were even treated to live music by Victorian carolers!
Watsons Chelsea Bazaar for quirky British gifts and knick-knacks.
Alastair Home & Design for elegant textiles, pottery, art and decorative accents, including a collection of homewares from one of my favourite designers, Jonathan Adler. (Fun fact: I met Jonathan once at the Toronto Interior Design Show. He was lovely… and I was starstruck!)
Stilettos & Sawdust for farmhouse-style wooden signs, artwork and home decor. They have lots of ready-made pieces in store, but their specialty is custom work. I have always wanted a monogrammed charcuterie board…
Wills & Prior for stunning high-end furniture and home decor. This is a store that wows as soon as you walk in the door: lofty ceilings, luxe furnishings, gorgeous art, and a Christmas tree straight out of Martha Stewart Living.
Got It Made for quirky gifts, cards, art, jewelry and home decor. Their eclectic collection includes vintage pieces, as well as handcrafted products from local makers.
Olive Your Favourites for gourmet olive oils and balsamic vinegars. They have a full tasting bar where you can sample anything you want! We picked up a couple of bottles to take home and we’ve been loving them. Bonus points for the dad joke in the store name!
Distinctly Tea for an extensive variety of luxury loose leaf teas (over 300, to be exact) and a beautiful collection of Polish teapots and pottery.
Antiques In Time for gorgeous antique clocks and watches. This is a tiny little store and all you hear is the endless ticking from the multitude of clocks around you – it’s actually quite soothing! (Grandfather clocks could be the next big ASMR genre…) I especially loved the cuckoo clock – it reminds me of one my grandmother had.
Fanfare Books for your next great read. Since 1967, this independent bookshop has been supplying Stratford with novels, nonfiction books, children’s lit, Shakespeare plays… whatever you like to read, you’re sure to find it here!
La Osa Jewelry & Vintage / Leftbank Shoppe for vintage clothing, art and home decor. I love the treasure-hunting aspect of vintage shopping – I get that from my mom, a dedicated secondhand shopper – and there’s tons of treasures to be found at this store! (Leftbank Shoppe is a pop-up at La Osa, owned by jewelry designer and vintage collector Pamela Coneybeare.)
MacLeods Scottish Shop for clothing and gifts imported directly from Scotland… think tartan everything.
Miss Sophie’s for shabby chic, French country-inspired home decor. These sparkly gingerbread houses are giving me all the Christmas village inspiration!
After shopping ’til we dropped, we were getting hungry, so we headed to Revival House for lunch. This is truly one of the most stunning restaurants I’ve ever been to. It’s located in a former church dating all the way back to 1873, and it’s absolutely breathtaking… I’ll let the photos speak for themselves! We ordered sandwiches – the crispy chicken and the portobello mushroom – and split them half-and-half. Both were delicious, and the portions were huge!
Even though we were stuffed from lunch, we couldn’t resist popping into Rheo Thompson Candies for a sweet treat. Founded in 1969, this acclaimed chocolatier is dedicated to the art of traditional candymaking. A family business that’s fully Canadian-owned-and-operated, they still make the majority of their products by hand, and you can taste it in the quality! We picked up a chocolate Santa and one of their famous ‘Smoothie’ bars for dessert (I’ll take that over a green smoothie any day!)
From downtown Stratford, it was just a five-minute drive to our next destination: Cozyn’s Garden Gallery. This sprawling 10,000-square-foot garden centre gets all decked out for the holidays with stunning Christmas trees, decorations and ornaments galore. Each tree is decorated with a specific theme, and they’re straight out of a decorating magazine. Seriously, who needs Pinterest when you can go to Cozyn’s!? (For more garden centre Christmas tree inspo, check out my post on Vandermeer Nursery in Ajax.)
And, because one garden centre full of Christmas trees simply isn’t enough, we headed about 15km south to St. Paul’s Station to visit Klomp’s Home & Garden. Just like Cozyn’s, Klomp’s is a Christmas lover’s paradise. With two floors of decorations – including faux and fresh-cut trees, wreaths, and what’s easily millions of ornaments – I could have spent hours in here.
Klomp’s fresh-cut trees were absolutely gorgeous! We have a faux tree at home, but just in case we’d decided to pick up a fresh one (I’ve been tempted many times!) the F-150 Lightning would have had us covered with its massive cargo bed. There’s also a 14.1-cubic-foot “frunk” at the front of the vehicle where the engine would normally be: the largest front trunk of any electric pickup on the market. Just another benefit of going green!
After all this, it was time to wrap up our fun-filled day in Stratford and head home to Burlington. Even though the roads were super snowy, the F-150 Lightning handled them beautifully, and we felt so safe. Thank you to Ford Canada for taking us to Stratford in style! Click here to watch my Instagram reel of our day. If you have any questions about any of the spots we visited, feel free to email me – I’m always happy to answer any questions. Until next time – which will be in 2025 – I hope you have a wonderful rest of your holiday season. See you all next year!
Our F-150 Lightning rental was provided through a partnership with Ford Canada. As always, all opinions and thoughts are entirely my own.
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