January 2, 2007

  • I notice that fewer people every year put out Christmas lights. On Christmas eve my friends and I drove back from church looking for Severenson street- a small street of fairly expensive houses where the residents still take Christmas seriously. We rolled through slowly, taking in the floodlit nativity scenes, the glowing Santas perched on rooftops, the glittering animals grazing in front lawns, and the overwhelming amount of Christmas lights lining the rooftops, edging the windows, draped over bushes, and twirled around trees. We weren't the only ones either; the traffic was practically bumper-to-bumper, and there were plenty of pedestrians on the sidewalk, many with dogs or kids in tow. This street has always been popular, but I've never seen it so crowded. But, the sad fact is: the rest of the town is mostly dark.

    I don't know what it is. It could be the energy crisis, or the war, or it could be that there aren't as many kids in Hollister pushing for it like they used to. Maybe it's the end of a tradition.

    Another year has passed, which is always awkward for an obsessive memory-collector like myself. Time continues to roll along unheeded, my friends and I get older, cities get larger, and everything seems to change. It's overwhelming sometimes, and though I dig my fingers into the silt as I pass by, I still end up getting swept out by the tide, floating in the ocean with dirty fingernails.

    We spent New Year's in San Jose, trying to find the party. Of course, we were the party, and we roamed the sidewalks wishing people a happy New Year and enjoyed the feeling of people being friendly to strangers. All piled in our hotel room again, we watched Saved By the Bell, a bit of nostalgia still somehow stuck on the television.

    The next day the sky was wide and blue the way a central Californian sky is. It's the kind of endless, frightening blue you see above the clouds from an airplane, but stretched from horizon to horizon, bare hills to low cityscapes on either side of the highway. We drove south from city to country, staring out the window. I saw a Christmas tree farm near an exit. Their season had ended a week ago, and now their season was just beginning; the lot was filled with triangular knee-high baby trees, even as their older siblings now were thrown unceremoniously in front lawns, tinsel still clinging to their dry branches.

    And so winter comes just as it came last year, and so the latest in a long string of new years. There is nothing new under the blank California sun, or under its vast sky either. And that's comforting, in its way.