tree's a crowd

[calimac]

Last night we thought we'd go out and look at some Christmas lights. The paper had said that the best displays locally were in a neighborhood of Willow Glen, so thither we drove, dodging the drivers on the freeway who frantically jump out of the exit-only lane into your lane right in front of you and then take the exit option anyway.

What we forgot is that everyone else reads the paper too and the neighborhood was jammed. The residential streets are narrow, there are cars parked end to end on both sides, and the traffic going both ways inches along slowly. Admittedly there's time to study the lights, but this is no way to enjoy them.

On top of which, I didn't find the displays there that fun. The main feature was lighted hoops or giant candy canes - depending on which street you were on - in front of each house, and any individual decorations tended to seem subsidiary. I like a street full of more chaotic, individualized decorations.

Note for next year: avoid the freeways and the crowds and just go to the likely neighborhoods in our own immediate area, where we've had success in the past.

Comments

[sturgeonslawyer]

Friday night I headed for the place where John Blaker lives. It took me fifteen minutes to get a quarter mile from the house, because two streets away is Thompson Avenue, which a recent article (I don't recall where) named as one of the top ten Christmas Tree Lanes in the US. It is pretty amazing -- or has been in the past; I didn't even try to go down it on Friday: perhaps we'll walk over tonight -- and I encountered precisely the traffic phenomenon of which you write. (They do not have uniform decor, except the greenstrip up the center of the street, which the Alameda power co. decorates every year, and they put up a Santa sleigh in which, on certain nights, an actual Santaoid poses with the kiddies without charging $22.95 (or whatever) for a picture.