At the Lu household, December usually follows the same script. Instead of airports and itineraries, self-taught freelance photographer and social media creative Madeline Lu, her husband Alexander and their teenagers Eva and Samuel stay close to home, guarding Christmas as the one part of the year that belongs entirely to them. For someone who spends much of the year travelling and shooting on assignment, it is the season Madeline keeps for home.
She talks about their usual December in a way that feels almost cinematic: advent calendars opened every morning; candles lit on Sundays; cookies baking while Christmas carols play; a tree hung with ornaments gathered on trips over the years. There are Christmas markets, glühwein, hot Apfelpunsch, presents opened in front of the fire. Busy, cosy, a little stressful – and exactly how they like it.
This time, they are doing something different. Rather than unwrapping presents by the fire, they will be boarding an expedition ship off the coast of Antarctica as part of one of our Edge of Ordinary journeys – a collaboration with The Ultimate Travel Company that takes their Christmas as far from ordinary as it has ever been.
For the Lus, it is the first time Christmas at home has been traded for anything. The turning point arrived quietly, on a screen.
When “Christmas in Antarctica” appears on the screen
The idea didn’t arrive in a strategy meeting or over a long family debate. It appeared in a browser tab.
“I saw the title Christmas in Antarctica on your website,” Madeline remembers. “I just thought, how cool is that? Christmas in Antarctica.”
Antarctica has sat at the top of their family bucket list for years. As a child, Madeline dreamed of one day standing on all seven continents. In her mind, Antarctica meant icebergs and a deep blue sea, penguins waddling along a shore at the far edge of the map, a place that felt almost unreal. If anywhere could coax them away from home at Christmas, it was always going to be here.
She tested the idea at home, half expecting the usual resistance. In the past, even suggesting a few days away over Christmas had been met with firm refusals. Everyone wanted to stay.
This time, it landed differently.
“First they said, ‘For real?’” she laughs. “Then it was a big, ‘Yeah, cool.’ We’re quite an adventurous family. We like travelling to unique places. Once I heard that, I knew.”
By March 2025, the voyage was booked. The family will fly from Buenos Aires to Ushuaia, spend a night at Arakur Ushuaia Resort & Spa, then board MS Seaventure for a ten night journey across the Drake Passage and into the Antarctic Sound, Weddell Sea and the peninsula. For four people who usually spend December around the same tree, they are suddenly planning to spend Christmas at what looks, on most maps, like the end of the world.
Rewriting Christmas: what stays, what goes
When asked what she will not miss about a traditional Christmas, Madeline does not hesitate: the logistics and the mess. The constant shopping and cooking. The moving parts. She speaks about the season with affection, but there is clear relief at setting some of that aside, just for one year.
She is equally relaxed about how it might look from the outside.
“We don’t really care about what others think,” she shrugs. “We want to live the way we want.”
They are not abandoning Christmas; they are shrinking it down to what matters most and taking that with them. A few small presents will be opened on Christmas Eve, as she did growing up in Germany. The real non-negotiable is the four of them being in the same place.
“The most important thing is that we will be together. That’s the most precious thing.”
Ten years from now, she hopes Eva and Samuel will remember this not as the year they “missed Christmas”, but as the year they “spent a very special Christmas together in one of the coolest destinations in the world” – and, if she is honest, as one of the best trips of their lives.
Why Antarctica, and why now
For Madeline, Antarctica is exactly the kind of journey we mean when we talk about the edge of ordinary: a place that takes effort to reach, where nature is in charge and the experience is less about ticking off sights than feeling what it is like to be there at all. Ice and wildlife set the rhythm; the weather has the final say. To stand in the middle of that with Alexander, Eva and Samuel at this point in their lives is what matters.
The timing feels precise. Eva and Samuel are now teenagers, close enough to adulthood to understand how rare it is to set foot on the seventh continent, but still happy to travel alongside their parents. A three week school holiday suddenly gives enough space to do a voyage like this properly, rather than trying to cram it into a shorter window.
Covid sits quietly underneath the decision.
“It taught us that life is short and how precious time is,” Madeline says. “We want to travel to the places we really want to see most with the time we have.”
Out of that has come a family rule of thumb.
“From now on, we want to be more intentional with our travels. Our time and money are precious. We should only go to places that are really on our bucket list.”
An Antarctic voyage at Christmas folds all of that together: a family rule about using their time well, a long-held dream and a decision to step just off their usual map. It is their own edge of ordinary.
A very online family, heading offline
Day to day, the Lus are as plugged in as any modern family. Madeline and Alexander both work from home, moving between laptops and phones. Her photography and social media work live partly on digital platforms, so filming, posting and replying is woven into the week. Eva and Samuel do their homework online and stay connected to friends on their own devices. Even downtime tends to involve a screen, with a shared series or film in the evenings.
AI has slipped into that picture, largely as a research tool. They rely on it enough to see how quickly it is reshaping the way people learn, but they keep a healthy scepticism.
“We are very aware of how AI has changed the way we learn, and very cautious with the answers it provides,” Madeline explains. “We prefer the real world and nature, so AI created digital content does not interest us.”
That contrast – between a life mediated by screens and a place that feels resolutely physical – is part of Antarctica’s pull.
“In a way, yes, the pace of digital life did influence us,” she admits. “We want to be more present and really be together. Ten days without the internet sounds like a dream.”
She can already feel the difference: not feeling obliged to check news alerts or social feeds; fewer work calls for Alexander; no homework for Eva and Samuel. They are not setting strict rules about phones. The hope is less rigid, more human – that they will look up more often, pay attention, let Antarctica wash over them instead of trying to capture every moment for later.
For a family whose work, school and downtime usually run through devices, vanishing off the grid for Christmas feels quietly radical.
Imagining Christmas at the end of the world
When Madeline lets her mind drift south, the images are vivid. White icebergs. A deep blue sea. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of penguins waddling along the shore, calling to each other and, she jokes, creating “maybe even some unpleasant smells”. She imagines the quiet too – that strange, layered silence you get when there are no crowds, just a ship easing through broken ice and the occasional crack as it shifts.
She talks as much about texture and feeling as she does about views: the slight tilt of the ship under her feet; the way the wind will sting her cheeks; the weight of the parka on her shoulders. She is looking forward to the smaller, unscripted moments as much as the headline ones – kayaking together as a family towards a low island, standing on deck with cold fingers wrapped around a mug, watching the light change.
She is realistic about Antarctica’s unpredictability. Wildlife is never guaranteed, even at the height of the season. That uncertainty feels like part of the point.
Inevitably, thoughts come back to the Drake Passage. “The Drake Crossing,” she calls it. “Roughly four days there and back, all in.” There is a hint of nerves there. She has medication packed and has read her way through long threads of practical advice on how to cope with the swell. “Fingers crossed,” she adds, half joking, half serious.
She thinks the reality of what they have chosen will probably land on Christmas Eve and Christmas morning. Those are the moments when the comparison with home will be clearest: no tree in the corner, no last minute rush to prep food, just steel-grey water and ice outside the window. Somewhere in there, she knows there will be a quieter kind of joy at not having to shop for a week’s worth of groceries or spend the day cooking and clearing away.
Her note to her future self is simple: be present; be grateful; remember how it felt to stand in a place she had pictured for years, with Alexander, Eva and Samuel beside her.
Behind the crossing: how the trip came together
Journeys like this do not begin at the gangway. They begin months earlier in a trail of emails and calls about ships and dates, questions about safety, worries about seasickness, practical talk about school holidays and flights. Underneath it all sits a quieter conversation about what this time is supposed to feel like.
When we first approached Madeline about a collaboration in Antarctica, her first thought was, “Is this for real?” This was not a destination she had ever filed under “maybe, one day”. It sat firmly in the “dream” column. “Antarctica is on the top of our bucket list,” she wrote back.
She also knew she did not want to build the trip alone from behind a screen. “Antarctica is very special. We have zero experience,” she says. For that, she wanted someone who had been.
Those conversations settled naturally around Claire, one of our polar specialists. Claire has sailed to Antarctica twice, so her advice comes from memory as much as from maps. She talked the family through how the journey would unfold – domestic flights, embarkation, days at sea, landings by zodiac – and what to pack, not just in terms of clothing but in terms of expectations. Knowing that she had crossed the Drake herself, twice, was a quiet but important reassurance.
The details that followed are the kind that rarely make it into glossy overviews but matter enormously to a family: a cabin layout that works for four, a departure date that fits the school calendar, how many nights to add before and after the cruise so they are not rushing in and out, a pace that leaves room to breathe. Claire laid out how they would reach the ship, what would happen once they were on board and how the days might roll once they crossed the Antarctic Convergence. As Madeline puts it, “She answered all the questions very well and addressed all the concerns that I have whiles making it all rather enjoyable.”
From her side, the planning has felt disconcertingly smooth. “Very easy and calm. Too easy, actually,” she laughs. “Normally, I have to plan a lot myself before a trip to make sure I don’t miss anything. This time, Claire did all the tremendous work.”
The app that gathers their itinerary in one place has only reinforced that feeling. It shows them what each day is meant to look like without the usual trail of PDFs and forwarded emails.
If a friend said that Antarctica sounds incredible but also like a lot of work, Madeline’s answer would be honest but light. Yes, there is a lot going on behind the scenes – just not on her desk. “Claire and The Ultimate Travel Company did all the planning,” she says. “All we have to do is show up and enjoy ourselves. If you have the time and the means to do it, I’d highly recommend doing it as soon as possible. Life is short. Why wait?!”
From our side, this is what an Edge of Ordinary journey looks like in practice: a remarkable destination at the right moment, with the detail held quietly in the background so a family can focus on being there together.
Christmas, reframed
In the end, this is not quite a story about cancelling Christmas. It is a story about moving it. The advent candles, the markets and the familiar ornaments will still be there another year. This December, the stockings are swapped for life jackets, the rustle of wrapping paper for the sound of penguins and ice.
What does not change is the centre of it all. For Madeline, Alexander, Eva and Samuel, Christmas has never really been about the address on the front door or the exact food on the table. It has always been about being together and sharing time that feels precious. Antarctica, for all its distance from home, may turn out to be the clearest expression of that yet.
Discover Ultimate Horizons
We’ve created something that sits between a brochure and a keepsake: Ultimate Horizons, our new coffee table book. Through long-form editorial, it lingers on each destination and the way travel can change how you see the world.
This Antarctica journey is part of that same spirit – an invitation to explore where the edge of ordinary might be for you.
Ultimate Horizons is complimentary. If you’d like to receive your copy, simply fill in our submission form and we’ll take care of the rest. And if this story has sparked ideas for your own travels, you can also speak to our experts to start a conversation about what comes next.
Image credits: Madeline Lu & Lisa LaPointe