Bill Clinton Shares His and Hillary's Holiday Plans with Chelsea and Their Grandkids in N.Y.C.

Kevin Mazur/Getty Hillary and Bill Clinton in January 2018

Bill Clinton is getting ready for another season of festivities in the Big Apple.

"Hillary says I've always been our family's Christmas elf," the 75-year-old former president tells PEOPLE during an interview about his new video lecture series with MasterClass.

This year, Clinton and his wife — former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — will continue a tradition of decamping from their Chappaqua, New York, home to spend the holiday in New York City with daughter Chelsea, her husband, Marc Mezvinsky, and their three children: Charlotte, Aidan and Jasper.

"We always go down on Christmas Eve, spend the night and have Christmas Day with them," Clinton says. "And I think it's the right thing to do, intergenerationally. And then we normally go to the train display at the Bronx Zoo. It's great."

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The holiday season has long been a special time for the Clintons. Hillary, her husband says, took special pride in how the family tree (kept on display in the upstairs residence) was decorated when the two lived at the White House.

"Even when we were in the White House, and they have that huge Christmas tree, she took responsibility every year for how it would be decorated and what we would do at Christmas," he says. "One of the most valuable things that came out of that was her effort to get American artists and craftspeople to contribute to Christmas."

AP Photo/Mark Duncan Bill (left) and Hillary Clinton

The couple still keeps a memento from that time: a set of glasswork designed by American craftspeople.

"It's down at the library and we've always got parts of it on display," he says.

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Clinton is close-lipped on what he's getting his wife this year, though he says his track record with gifts includes a few big winners.

"Every now and then I had a home run," he says. "I gave her a ring once after we had been married for 25 years, and she liked that a lot."