New Hampshire Nature Guide: December 2026
December brings full winter to New Hampshire — short days, deepening snow in the mountains, frozen lakes, and the quiet of the dormant season. The bird year resets with the Christmas Bird Counts, the Seacoast holds its winter spectacle, and the longest nights of the year light up with the brilliant winter stars.
What to look for this week
- Feeders are at their winter peak — black-capped chickadees, nuthatches, and cardinals work the seed, with purple finches, redpolls, and siskins possible in a northern-finch irruption year.
- The Quadrantid meteor shower peaks in a short, sharp burst around January 3; watch the northeast after midnight from a dark White Mountains site.
- A planning week — order seeds early, especially the short-season varieties North Country and high-elevation gardens depend on, before they sell out.
Birds This Month
December settles New Hampshire into its winter birding, marked by the Christmas Bird Counts held across the state. Feeders are busy with the winter regulars — black-capped chickadees, tufted titmice, white-breasted and red-breasted nuthatches, downy and hairy woodpeckers, cardinals, blue jays, dark-eyed juncos, American tree sparrows, and the state bird, the purple finch — with northern-finch irruptions of redpolls, siskins, evening grosbeaks, and crossbills in good years.
The Seacoast holds the season's marquee birds: wintering common eider, long-tailed duck, all three scoters, harlequin ducks at Rye, purple sandpipers on the ledges, and loons and grebes offshore. Snowy owls hunt the dunes and Hampton marshes in irruption years. Bald eagles concentrate on the open water of the Connecticut and Merrimack rivers and Great Bay, and great horned owls begin their winter hooting. Keep feeders full and water unfrozen for the birds through the deep cold.
What's Blooming
December has no wildflowers blooming in New Hampshire — the land is frozen and snow-covered from the Seacoast to the summits, and the botanical year is at its deepest rest. The interest lies in winter structure and persistence: the dried seed heads of goldenrod, New England aster, milkweed, and joe-pye weed stand above the snow, feeding finches and sparrows and catching the low light of the year's shortest days.
In the woods, the evergreen leaves of partridgeberry (with its bright red berries), wintergreen, trailing arbutus, and the leathery fronds of Christmas fern hold the only green at the forest floor beneath the snow. The native winterberry holly blazes with red berries in the wet thickets, the most colorful plant of the season and a favorite of birds. Indoors, gardeners force amaryllis and paperwhites into bloom, and the first seed catalogs arrive to begin planning the year ahead. The true bloom season is months away.
Garden This Month
December is rest and planning for New Hampshire gardeners, the ground frozen statewide. The active work is at the desk: review the past season, browse the first seed catalogs, and begin ordering seeds — especially the short-season varieties the North Country depends on — before favorites sell out. Sketch next year's beds and plan crop rotations.
Outdoors, let snow stay banked over perennial beds and strawberries as insulation, and gently knock heavy, wet snow off arborvitae, yews, and evergreen shrubs to prevent the branch breakage a December snow or ice load brings. Protect young trees from rodent and deer browsing as natural food grows scarce. Check stored dahlia tubers, bulbs, and any overwintering geraniums for rot. Keep bird feeders full and a heated birdbath open. Tend houseplants, which need the least water of the year in the dim, dry indoor air, and force paperwhites or an amaryllis for winter color. The garden sleeps until spring.
Zone 4a (North Country & high valleys): deep winter, with lasting snow cover down. The garden is fully dormant; trust the snowpack to insulate perennials, knock heavy snow off evergreens, and begin browsing seed catalogs for the very short season ahead.
Zone 5b (interior & lakes region): the ground is frozen and beds are dormant under snow. Check that mulch and snow protect perennials and strawberries, brush heavy snow off arborvitae and shrubs, and start planning and ordering seeds for next year.
Zone 6a (Seacoast & lower Merrimack): the mildest gardens freeze hard but hold less snow. Watch for freeze-thaw heaving of fall plantings, keep beds mulched, and on a thawed day you can still do a little dormant pruning of fruit trees.
What's at the Farmers Market
December markets in New Hampshire run on storage crops and the holiday harvest. The vegetable selection is the winter keepers: potatoes, carrots, beets, parsnips, turnips, rutabaga, celeriac, winter squash, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, leeks, onions, and garlic, with cold-frame and greenhouse spinach, kale, and microgreens from year-round growers, sweetened by the cold. Stored apples and cider and cranberries carry the fruit.
This is the heart of the holiday farm-store season: maple syrup, raw honey, farmstead cheeses, eggs, pasture-raised meats, and especially cut Christmas trees, wreaths, and balsam fir greenery and garland — a major New Hampshire seasonal product, fragrant and fresh-cut. Choose storage roots and squash that are firm and unblemished, keeping roots and cabbage cold and humid and cured squash and onions cool and dry. For a Christmas tree, pick one with flexible, well-attached needles and keep it watered. Winter markets and farm stores carry the season's harvest and holiday goods.
Night Sky This Month
December holds the longest nights of the year around the winter solstice, and the brilliant winter sky returns in full. Orion climbs the eastern sky in the evening, his belt pointing to brilliant Sirius rising in the southeast and to orange Aldebaran and the Pleiades in Taurus. The whole Winter Hexagon — Sirius, Procyon, Pollux, Capella, Aldebaran, and Rigel — sprawls across the long, dark sky.
The Geminid meteor shower peaks around December 14 and is the best shower of the year — slow, bright, and abundant, with the radiant in Gemini rising in the early evening, so it can be watched all night from a dark site, bundled against the cold. The Ursids follow near the solstice. The cold, dry air gives the steadiest, most transparent skies of the year, superb from the dark White Mountains and North Country, with strong winter aurora chances on active nights. The printable New Hampshire night-sky guide lists this year's exact Geminid peak, moon phase, and planet positions.
Butterflies & Pollinators
No butterflies fly in New Hampshire in December — the cold, the short days, and the snow keep every species locked in its overwintering stage. They are present, though, hidden across the dormant landscape. The adult-overwintering mourning cloak, eastern comma, and gray comma are tucked behind loose bark, in woodpiles, and in sheltered crevices, supercooled and motionless, waiting for the first warm days of spring.
The rest of the state's butterflies pass the solstice as eggs glued to twigs, as caterpillars frozen in the leaf litter (the woolly bears among them), or as chrysalises hanging on stems and bark, all relying on natural antifreeze and the insulating snow to survive the cold. The monarchs are clustered by the millions in the high fir forests of central Mexico, half a continent away. December is the time to plan next year's butterfly garden — to map where the native milkweed, asters, and nectar plants will go when the ground thaws and the cycle begins again.
Trees This Month
December is deep winter for New Hampshire's trees, and the evergreens define the landscape. Eastern white pine — the state's great soft-needled pine — red spruce, balsam fir, and eastern hemlock hold their green against the snow, the spruce and fir darkening the mountain slopes and North Country, and the fragrant balsam fir is the classic New Hampshire Christmas tree and wreath green. The white-barked trunks of white birch, the state tree, glow against the snow.
The hardwoods stand bare and dormant — sugar maple, red maple, yellow birch, red oak, and the rest — their winter silhouettes and bark on full display, while young American beech rustle their pale, clinging leaves and the oaks hold some of theirs into winter. The native winterberry blazes red in the wetlands. Snow and ice load is the season's hazard, capable of bending birches double and splitting crowns. The trees rest fully now, their buds set and sealed since fall, waiting out the cold and the lengthening dark for the light's slow return.
Go deeper with the New Hampshire guides
The complete New Hampshire birding, native-plant, wildflower, and night-sky guides — or the whole year in one bundle.
Same month elsewhere: December in New Jersey · December in New Mexico · December in New York