Christmas in San Francisco
Meet me at the St. Francis! The west coast equivalent of Rockefeller
Center, San Francisco's Union Square, across from the St. Francis Hotel.
December
21, 2008: Fall has come to California, as announced by the
turning of the leaves on our backyard Japanese maple last week. And
fall in California means it's Christmas time! Confused yet?
Okay, we have only one tree on our property whose leaves turn color and that takes place in mid-December.
How do we know when it's winter, you ask? That's easy: winter arrives here in January when the orchids start blooming in our backyard.
For Pat, the Christmas season begins the week after Labor Day and after nearly four months of Christmas music playing eight hours a day at JC Penney, he's a regular Scrooge by the time December 25th arrives. At our age there is nothing either one of us wants that we can't just go out and get, so we've abandoned the whole gift exchange thing in favor of seeing whatever Broadway show is playing San Francisco around the holidays. This season we'll be going over to see Wicked after it arrives at the Orpheum Theatre on January 27th.
But we're not entirely bah-humbug about the holidays. Pat spends a few weeks each year creating tree ornaments that he wraps individually and hands out to his fellow JC Penney coworkers. I run down to Wal-Mart and pick up eight boxes of Queen Anne chocolate-covered cherries for Pat which I give him one box at a time throughout the season. This year he's been going through the boxes faster than usual and, coupled with the fact I've already given two of the boxes away to our next-door neighbor when she stops by to chat, I've had to make a second run to Wal-Mart to replenish the supply. No, I'm not that altruistic; I was also out of the eggnog that I guzzle like a goose.
October
to April is the rainy season here in northern California and we've had
years where it rained incessantly for weeks at a time. The majority
of our Pacific winter storms come down from the Gulf of Alaska bringing
with them Arctic air which, just last week, dumped 6 - 10 inches of
snow on local mountain peaks and dropped overnight temperatures here
along the bay into the 30s. But if the weather is amenable, our favorite
thing to do during the holidays is to cross the bay to San Francisco
to see the window displays and Christmas lights in the city.
This
past Friday night (December 19th) we caught a break from the winter
storms stacked up out in the Pacific between here and Alaska, fed the
cats early, and headed down to the Coliseum BART station to catch a
train over to the city. Emerging to street level from San Francisco's
Powell Street station, Pat and I were greeted with mild temperatures
and placid air. First stop: Lefty
O'Doul's on Geary Street, just half a block from Union Square. Dinner
for two consisting of a piled roast beef sandwich, bowl of custard,
and cup of coffee for me and a piled turkey sandwich and carrot-raisin
salad for Pat, all for $21! Lefty's was crammed
with holiday merry-makers, but we managed to find a table in the back
where we could actually hear each other speak, away from the piano playing
comic singer up by the entrance.
After
dinner we made our way over to Union Square to ogle the hundred-foot
tall Christmas tree, the ice-skating rink, and the lights in Macy*s
windows. Then we crossed Post Street to gaze in the display windows
of Saks
Fifth Avenue and drool over the jewelry to die for in the windows
of Tiffany's. At the southeast corner of Union Square (Geary & Stockton)
stands Nieman-Marcus which in years past has always been closed by the
time we arrived in the area. But this year we arrived at their front
door fifteen minutes before their eight o'clock closing time and finally
got to go inside where we were able to gaze up at the Tiffany stained-glass
dome topping the rotunda containing their four-story Christmas tree.
Down
Stockton Street to view the display windows on Macy*s east side which
this year have been turned into pet adoption windows with a Santa's
workshop & mailroom theme. Kittens and puppies had their individual
holiday decorated rooms in each of the windows with letters to Santa
traveling on a conveyer system above them. By this night, the San Francisco
SPCA had adopted out 117 abandoned pets through Macy*s efforts.
Next
stop, the Apple
Store at the corner of Stockton & Ellis. As glitzy as the Apple
Store is, there's nowhere to sit down and I had forgotten my glasses
at home. So, we fondled a few MacBook Airs and ogled the huge screen,
self-contained iMacs before heading down to Market Street and into the
Westfield
Mall where we finally got to enter the newly opened Bloomingdale's
and dream of coming back in our next lives as wealthy playboys.
By now, my legs and back had reached their limit for walking around, so when I spotted an empty chair in Westfield's rotunda, I parked my buns and sent Pat to explore the stores on his own. Leaning back, I gazed up at the dome, ten stories above the rotunda, from which hung the strands of lights forming a Christmas tree from ceiling to floor. The rotunda itself bisects the eight floors of Nordstrom's which are accessed by the only semi-circular escalators I have ever seen.
Pat
returned half an hour later ready to head home after trekking around
the city on top of his eight hours at work earlier in the day. I needed
the men's room, so I had him take my seat while I headed down to the
lower level. Fifteen minutes later, we were out the door, back where
we started at Market & Powell, and walked down into the BART station
to catch a train back to our side of the bay.
The four-car Dublin-Pleasanton train was SRO, but we managed to get adjoining seats for the twenty-minute ride. Pat offered his seat to a woman standing beside us with luggage and holiday shopping bags, but she declined. So, he kept her entertained with photos of our cats on his camera. We walked in the front door of our house in Oakland at 9:20 p.m., gone barely four hours, but ready for a burning log in the fireplace, a couple of cocktails, and some TV viewing from the comfort of our living room furniture. Hey! At 58 and 60 respectively, we're wusses and don't mind admitting it! The cats promptly joined us on our laps. Quite the holiday image, no?
