A little cocoon, snug in a fur coat, warding off the shiver.  A magnolia blossom, in very early stages.  What is gray and fuzzy now will soon be creamy pink, fragrant and bold, seemingly overnight.  Soon.  But not yet. 

In that one corner of the yard, I’d forgotten the daffodils that grow wild.  Their leaves have come on bold and green with the promise of emerging stalks soon carrying butter yellow blooms.  Soon.  But not yet. 

I stop and smile.  I remember that December 21st was the shortest day of the year, a milestone that now lies in the past.  Even though this weekend promises torrential rain (which the California soil will gladly drink up), gray skies, and gloom, the fact of the matter is that Spring is on its way with rush of color and fresh leaves, activity, joy and warmth. 

The sunshine of my favorite season will soon come to push back the gloom and cobwebs in my mind and replace it with tulips and lilacs and California poppies. 

I will photograph and paint and pick and sniff all of the riotous wildflowers that California has to offer.  I will smile when I see them growing in the unlikeliest of places. 

Oh so very soon I will bask in the Spring warmth and smile at the clear skies and feel happy as the sun sets later and later each day. 

As I was writing it, I thought to myself, you know….I’ve lived in the Bay Area for twenty years.  Maybe it’s time to write a top ten for my current home. 

I mean, I am an ex-pat New Mexican and will always be a New Mexican, but I’ve lived in the Bay Area long enough to also call it home.  I guess I’m lucky in that way, to call more than one place my home. 

And so without further ado:

Top Ten Things I Love About Christmas In The Bay Area

1) San Francisco’s buildings lit up like presents.  Around Thanksgiving the buildings on and near the Embarcadero turn into glittering holiday presents and the Ferry Building lights up red and green. 

My first Christmas living here, I’d taken a ferry over to Sausalito to buy presents.  When I came back over on the ferry, just as the sun was setting, I saw those gift-wrapped buildings for the first time I couldn’t stop staring.  It’s so beautiful and an annual tradition. 

This was taken just after New Year’s Eve fireworks last year, hence the smoke, but the view can’t be beat.  Image found here

2) And while we’re talking about things down on the Embarcadero, how about the tradition of Palm trees wrapped in Christmas lights?  Other than one sickly Palm tree doing its best to grow by the NMSU library, there aren’t really a lot of Palm trees in New Mexico. 

But there are plenty here and I love that they get in on the holiday fun.  The Bay Area is hardly the only place to feature lit up holiday Palm trees, but it is the first place I ever saw the style and I’ve always loved it. 

3) To stay on the theme of trees, the Bay Area hosts and awful lot of offbeat Christmas trees each year.  I don’t recall seeing a lot of weird trees back home in New Mexico, mostly normal trees decorated in the traditional way (which I love).  But since living here in the Bay Area, I’ve seen a variety of trees including one decorated with only the heads ripped from dolls (weird), a tree decked out solely in Star Trek gear (nerdy), trees made of alternative materials like lab supplies, computer servers and routers, and then this one found at an architecture firm by internet friend, UPS driver extraordinaire, and longtime San Franciscan, Rafael Monterrosa. 

Photo copyright Rafael Monterrosa (@rafael415 on Instagram), and used with permission.  Give Rafael a follow, he is a fantastic photographer and posts photos from his travels all around the city of San Francisco.  He’s got a sharp photographic eye and knowledge of the City like no one else. 

4) Okay, one last tree thing: Another fine Bay Area holiday tradition is tree lighting ceremonies.  Usually happenig the weekend after Thanksgiving, every town has at least one.  From the Union Square and Ghirardelli Square events in San Francisco, to Jack London Square in Oakland, to Christmas in the Park in San Jose, and lots of smaller neighborhoods and businesses in between, people love to come out to see trees light up for the first time of the season, drink hot chocolate, and get into the holiday mood. 

5) Now it’s time to move on to the fantastic Bay Area food traditions at the holidays.  Let’s talk about Lumpia which can be found at just about every holiday potluck.  Living in the Bay Area has opened me up to the traditions of so many cultures that I just never experienced back home in New Mexico. 

I have been honored to know and work with so many amazing people from the Philippines, and they have lovingly introduced me to their food, most notably lumpia, which can roughly be described as a Philippino egg roll.  More colloquially it’s been called the food equivalent of crack, and I can’t disagree. 

Nothing more joyful than a huge pile of lumpia at the holiday party.  No matter how many are in the pile, they will certainly ALL be gone within no time, and I will do my part to make them disappear.  So freaking good. 

6) Let’s keep talking about holiday pot lucks because the Bay Area likes to eat, something I have always loved that about living here.  In addition to lumpia, holiday eating in the Bay is an enormous cross section of diverse foods, all of them delicious. 

I mean, come on!  The amazing diversity of the Bay Area means the best of foods from around the world.  What’s not to love? 

7) I’m not done talking about food either.  Holiday season is also Dungeness crab season.  Starting roughly in November (start dates depend on a lot of things), this is the time of year where the commercial crab season opens, and oh what a season. 

For many Bay Area families, it’s tradition to go down to the wharf or to certain places at the coast on Christmas morning to buy crab.  Fresh caught that morning, and you can take it home and cook it yourself, or pick one out from the steaming vats. 

As a single gal, I used to celebrate holidays with a dear friend, and she loved this tradition.  She’d go out early in the morning to buy crab then put a huge stock pot in the middle of her dining room table to catch the shells and we’d dive in with hands and metal crab crackers.  Some folks think eating crab is too much work, I say those people leave more crab for me and that’s just fine.  Delicious! 

8) Going to the beach on Christmas day.  One of the best Christmases I ever had was when I was all alone, a little depressed, and I made the excellent decision to pack up some leftover Chinese food, a blanket and a small radio and head to the beaches of Half Moon Bay for the day.  It was a balmy 65 degrees and for many hours I had the beach all to myself.  I read, I ate, I zoned out, I watched the waves, and I wasn’t lonely for a minute. 

9) The smell of eucalyptus and fog.  Okay, fair enough, this is not just a holiday thing, but for some reason it stands out for me during the holiday season.  The Bay Area is home to quite a few Eucalyptus trees, which are actually an invasive species, but are now just a part of life here. 

The Bay Area geography means we have what is called a “marine layer“, which is the reason for the iconic fog we experience.  Roughly explained, when a warm Bay Area day meets the cool, cool Pacific Ocean, they crash into each other and create fog. 

Add to that when a Eucalyptus tree gets warmed up, it releases its very aromatic oils. 

So you have a warm tree giving off oils and by the afternoon a marine layer pushing ocean fog into the Bay Area.  This creates a smell that is unique to the Bay Area all year round.  Add in the moist damp air from the rainy season that starts around the holidays and you have something that will forever be etched in my mind.  Even my sister recently commented on her memory of the Eucalyptus smell from her last visit. 

10) To use a colloquialism from the internet, I truly love the way the Bay Area is so very extra at the holidays.  Examples include the enormous real Gingerbread House at the Fairmont hotel, the entire Oakland Zoo covered in holiday lights, the huge Dickens fair, the full size skating rink constructed every year at the Embarcadero Plaza, real live reindeer at the Discovery Museum, the lighted boat parade with holiday lights from San Francisco’s not one but two yacht clubs, and that’s not even the beginning of a comprehensive list.  There is always something to do, to try, to remember, and to make a tradition. 

The Bay Area loves the holidays and I love everything about that. 

_______________

Well that ended up being an awful lot of fun to write.  Maybe posting this version right after my New Mexico version becomes my new holiday tradition. 

Basically, I just love the holidays and all the food, smells, and trees, so I guess wherever in the world I live, I’ll find something to love and write about at the holidays. 

Thanks for coming along with me on this journey.  Feel free to tell me what you love best about the holidays where you live either here or on any of the social media where we connect. 

And to you and yours, wherever in the world you are, wishing a wonderful, joyful, and magic holiday season. 

Originally written in a fit of holiday homesickness in 2007, I republished it at the holidays for many years. 

It’s been a while since I put it up on the blog, and this year I decided not to republish that same post but instead write a new one.  It’s now eleven years later and things have changed.  I have changed. 

I’m sure many of the items will be the same, but may be on the list for a different reason.  I don’t know, I’m riffing this as it comes to me.  Eleven years seems like a long time, then hardly a blip on the radar too. 

1) The smell of piñon fire smoke mixed with the smell of snow or very cold air.  Don’t think snow has a smell?  Think again.  And piñon is the smell of home, hands down.  Where I live now it’s often a spare the air day, so no fires.  And also, no snow. 

2) Shopping with my mom for the annual Christmas ornament.  Usually we shopped in Old Town, but not always.  I took the challenge of picking out my annual ornament very seriously.  I have all of them now in a box.  Maybe I should hang them on the tree this year?  I haven’t done that in a while. 

3) Biscochitos for sale pretty much everywhere.  I love making them but also love eating them so sometimes my demand outpaced my supply.  There was a little restaurant in Los Lunas that my folks used to like for breakfast that sold their own biscochos by the register.  So light and crumbly.  Gah!  I could go for one now. 

4) Tamales as gifts.  Tamales at holiday pot lucks.  Tamales at holiday parties.  Just, all the tamales!  All the time. 

5) Creamland Egg Nog.  You might say, “What now?  Don’t they have egg nog out there in crazy California?”  Yes they do, but I’ve never found any I liked as much as that local NM dairy brand.  Plus now that my ol’ rig can’t tolerate dairy like it used to, I just have live in memories of glasses of delicious chilled nog from childhood. 

6) This holiday candle my mom had from Avon that she only put out at the holidays.  It smelled SO good.  I have no idea what the smell even was, some sort of spiced berry thing.  It was in a really pretty gold painted glass container. 

Oh wait, holy moly.  I found a photo online.  This is it!  Called Avon First Christmas Frankincense & Myrrh, circa 1967 to 1972.  This is the scent of my childhood holidays.  Man I miss that smell.  It’s all Christmas Eve just after Mass, gazing at the tree, eating tamales, and you know, drinking big glasses of egg nog. 

7) Holiday happy hour at Gardunos, the one by Winrock.  They’d decorate that whole warehouse looking place for the holidays.  The margaritas flowed and mariachis played and there were good eats in abundance.  I hear that the quality of Gardunos has gone to meh in recent years, and that makes me sad.  Those days live on in memories from my mid-to-late 20s. ( Well, there are quite a few things I miss from my 20s.  My waistline, for example.) 

8) And also sopaipillas.  Which isn’t really just a holiday but year-round thing, but gall durn I miss them. 

9) Snow on Sandia Crest.  Or snow on the Organ Mountains.  Or snow on any of the gorgeous mountains in New Mexico. ( and the delicious city water that flows at spring thaw).  I do NOT miss driving in snow, or how crazy people get when it is snowing, or cleaning snow off the car.  Or for that matter, snow melting then re-freezing for weeks so you have that one patch that you slip on every single morning on your way to work. 

But snow in the mountains?  Perfection. 

10) Making, placing, and lighting luminarias.  Yes, we called them luminarias, correctly or not.  Labor intensive but a labor of love.  Digging up good New Mexico soil to fill paper bags and plopping in a candle.  Stamping out the fire when the NM winds got to be too much… Like that. 

Wow, so that is ten.  It’s over as quick as it started.  You know, ten seems hardly enough to capture all of the homesick in my heart, but this list is a pretty good place to start. 

Maybe later tonight I’ll sip a little good Irish Whiskey (which doesn’t hurt my tummy!)  and put my old childhood ornaments on the tree and hug The Good Man and The Feline and let memories have me for a while. 

Coming up in the next few days: When I am done with the Wayback Machine, I think it is time to write the Top Ten Things I Love about Christmas in the Bay Area.  There is a lot to love at the holidays, and after living here for 20 years, maybe it is time to give it its due. 

Very cool image of Central Avenue in the 1950s-ish, at Christmastime was found here. 

And my home smells like my fair New Mexico, the best air freshener in the world. 

Footnotes:
1) The chiles were procured in the Bay Area but certified to be from Hatch (if they passed off Anaheims, so help me….) 
2) Roasting in the oven < Fire roasted, but The Good Man put the nix on a flamethrower.  The discussion continues. 
3) There’s not very many in this batch, but we’re just getting warmed up.  Pun intended. 

Well, it came out in the print version in April and I decided to wait for the issue to be loaded up online before sharing.  Well, Issue 13 is online, however…..my story is listed in the table of contents but it’s not printed in the online version. 

Grr. 

I’ve sent a few notes but I think the editorial team is off on summer vacation. 

While I love the folks and SLAB and am so very, very grateful they published my story, I don’t really want to wait anymore to share my little story with the world. 

So I scanned that bad boy and you can read my little baseball story today, a few weeks before the All Star Break. 

Karen Fayeth

Contact

Get in touch:

karen-at-karenfayeth dot com

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About Me

Raised most of my life in New Mexico, my job brought me to Northern California.  I don't usually identify myself as a Californian, simply a New Mexican living in California.  In the first couple years after moving, I distanced myself from my home state thinking it backward and remote.  Then I began to visit home more frequently and truly learned a love for my home state that only comes by gaining perspective.  I'm a writer, a crafter, a photographer and labor at a "real job" during the days.