Los Angeles herald., 1906-12-25
WONDERFUL CHRISTMAS
OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
All the Hills Are Afan1e with Holly Berries and
Greenery, and All the Valleys Are Rich with
the Poppy'S Glow
rrom the San FraneIsco chronIcle.
the Poppy'S GLOW


on the great Aeolian harp of the hills
! is ever quite so sweet, ever quite so
full of melody by sunlight as by star
| light.
There is something inexpfessibly like
| the songs of these wonderful trouba-
doris of the New World I'm the rain wind
when 1t comes wandering through the
pines. It seems to be half sobbing q
requiem for a race whose day is for
ever done, half breathing a paean of
victory for the world to be born anew
beneath the touch of the falling rain
that 1t knows Is following on the trail
of it's flowing robe.
And, rs the rain wind passes, there
comes for just a moment a brief space
of such still calm as lies over no other
land i'm the world. SO quiet all the
trees and the streams and the noun
tains are that the time is gone before
one realizes why such silence fell on
the outdoors-and then, then comes the
rain, first in great FLASHING drops that
break into Z. thousand globules of mol
ten silver. bursting their way through
the woven thatch of the piney woods
pattering down on the warm ground
plunglng headlong with wide circles
that seem like ripping smiles, into the
race of the stream.
Sings of Christmas
After the first big outburst, after the
heralds of the storm--the wind and the
great drops-have passed, the real
storm bursts with shrill battle cry upon
the hills. But with all its noise and
bluster 1t is a great buffer, this Cali
fornia rain. Sometimes the god of
storms sends a bit of thunder with 1t,
sometimes he writes his autograph in
letters of living light across the scroll
OF the heavens, but more often it is
quiet sort of affair, just the thing the
Wlndtowers and the Violets and the
wild roses and the lilies and the pop
pies and the tulips need, a sort of
gardener in chief to old mother nature,
as 1t were, to set all her world Alright
before the coming of her fairest daugh-
ter, California's spring.
Then there Is the same rain wind.
when it has finished with the hills and
drawn down upon the mesas and the
little valleys where the golden poppies
lie, buried with the dust of all the
thousands that have trod this sun
kissed land in the days that are gone
Here again it sings of Christmas, of
the days of promise, of the wealth of
blossom and of life it is to bring to a
waiting world. Like as of old, the an
gels sang to the shepherds of Judea's
hills, so now, in a land close akin to
that, the wind tells the story to a
material world which they told well
nigh 1000 years ago to a spiritual uni
verse;
Here and there beneath the oaks lie
the ruins of a sun-kissed dobe, its
owners forgotten, its history a word
dropped now and then by one whose
world is in the past, and all too fast
In California is the dead past burying
its dead. Through the walls of the
urind he ;rl.1
little brook sobbed in the gorge of the
range before it broke away, as the wind
Is about to do, and wandered on about
the business of it's life.
Each year the wind and the rain
soften little by little the traces of the
old days. Here a corner carved from
some crumbling WALL there a section
from tiled roof, while ever round
their feet the yuletide brings a fresher,
greener carpet of grass and flowers to
cover the scars time alone may heal.
About Christmas time, too, comes
the wind up out of the sea, singing it's
soft, sweet song to the white combers
and the yet winter sea birds that wheel
and whirl through it's freshening
breath. Yachting on the ocean around
Christmas in California is one of the
finest sports in all the gamut of the
games of the outdoors. No Mediterra-
mean skies ever sheltered one-half so
beautiful sea as that which lies along
the length of the Golden State; no
shore is quite so perfect or yet so safe
to coast along. Storms seldom sweep
the gray old Pacific, and when they do
they come with a breath of wind and
go with another, SO that the hand of
wrath is seldom laid for long on the
sailor upon the water world of the west.
Christmas Comes to the Hills
Yet, in spite of the lure of the noun
tains and the sea and the streams and
the winds Of the west there is some
thing wonderfully attractive about the
a IT,