My wife and I used to come up from New York to spend Christmas and new years walking around, bird watching, spotting seals, reading and sketching the landscape(me). There were almost no accommodations open, but while it wasn't very cheap, it was quiet, beautiful, and a lot less expensive than the summer. Then some travel magazine wrote about it being great in the off-season, and how you could get drunk on new years and walk everywhere, and all of a sudden it was filled with private planes and the rates went through the roof. We've lived in RI now for over twenty years and haven't been back to BI.