Christmas in Walla Walla

Started: 2024-01-11 21:03:52

Submitted: 2024-01-15 17:37:54

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Visiting my parents for Christmas

This year the kids' school didn't get out until Friday, the 22nd of December, three days before Christmas. Our school district tries to cram in an entire semester before Christmas, which explains why we started school so early in August and get out so early in June. This calendrical trade-off means that Calvin's first semester finals wrapped up before Christmas — or at least, they should have, except Calvin got sick for the last two days of finals, with a fever high enough that Kiesa kept him home from school and then had to scramble to make up his finals in time.

The morning after the winter solstice I went on a run down to the overlook above Seabright Beach and saw the sun rising above Monterey Bay. The darkest part of winter was over and the days would start getting longer. This was real, and also a metaphor.

We celebrated Christmas with our nuclear family on Saturday, the 23rd of December, by opening our own presents under the Christmas tree. Kiesa gave up and asked what I wanted for Christmas and got me what I asked for, a new pair of Bose cordless noise-cancelling headphones. (The earcups keep wearing out on my ten-year-old Bose noise-cancelling corded headphones, and I keep replacing them and they keep working, but I'd like cordless headphones so I don't have to keep fumbling with a cord while I'm listening to music at my desk. This seemed kind of frivolous for me to buy for myself because I had headphones that worked well enough, but Kiesa thought it would be perfectly reasonable for Christmas and I wasn't going to disagree.)

For dinner on Saturday we went to eat at a local Indian restaurant, then visited Farley's Christmas Wonderland, which is just some guy's back yard in Seabright packed with large-scale Christmas decoration. Somehow the yard gathers so much Christmas kitsch in one place that it crosses over into the sublime. (I stumbled on it last year.)

One thing that this photo fails to convey is just how crowded it was, two days before Christmas. The yard was packed with people walking around the paths through the yard, roughly laid out in a figure-eight around Christmas trees (in both natural and garish mid-century colors) and life-sized nutcrackers crowded with other decorations. I saw some changes from last year but the net effect was the same: a strong jolt of Christmas cheer, like a shot of strong peppermint flavor, enjoyable in small doses.

Christmas Eve

On Christmas Eve we drove over the mountain and up the peninsula to SFO to catch a flight to Pasco to spend Christmas with my parents. Since the last time I flew from San Francisco to Pasco, United has upgraded the aircraft from a 50-seat CRJ-200 to a 76-seat ERJ175, though they're only operating two flights per day, and I haven't found a good source for old airline timetables to check whether how overall capacity has changed over time. (The first time I flew from Pasco, more than twenty years ago, United was operating EMB-120 turboprops from Pasco to Seattle.)

We hit turbulence in the second half of the flight somewhere over Oregon, as we were flying at cruising altitude between layers of clouds above and below us. The pilots asked the cabin crew to remain seated during our descent into Pasco.

After we arrived in Pasco we ate lunch at Mod Pizza a few miles from the airport, then drove to my parents' house in Walla Walla. Since the last time I visited, more of US highway 12 has been rebuilt and rerouted as a four-lane divided highway, rather than the two-lane highway I remember.

Kiesa and I stayed at the Marcus Whitman Hotel in downtown Walla Walla, and the kids stayed at my parents' house. This gave us operational flexibility at bedtime: Julian could go to bed when he was ready, and Kiesa and I could leave sometime later, whenever we were ready to leave. My brother Willy and his family ended up not coming for Christmas, but we ended up using the extra space anyway by putting Calvin in his own room to make it easier for him to quarantine while recovering from whatever he came down with during his finals week.

Christmas Day

On the Christmas morning a thick frost settled across Walla Walla, bringing a hint of white that was not unlike a white snowy Christmas.

We ended up delaying our Christmas celebrations by a day because my sister Bethany observed Christmas with her mother-in-law outside of Portland, and drove to join us in Walla Walla on the afternoon of Christmas. While the rest of Walla Walla was celebrating Christmas, we had a low-key day at my parents' house and took a walk around College Place in the cold.

In the evening, when Bethany arrived, we observed our traditional Christmas Eve celebration, cheese fondue.

Boxing Day

We celebrated Christmas on Boxing Day, starting with opening stockings first thing in the morning, then eating a Christmas morning brunch, then opening presents. (We managed to skip the part where we waited for my father to do unrelated yard work before opening presents.)

In the evening we sat down for our big Christmas dinner.

Wednesday

On Wednesday we made apple strudel, following my great-grandmother's recipe handed down through the generations.

The first step was to stretch out the dough so that it covered the table, creating the thin dough we'd use to roll up the layers.

Then we filled the dough with bread crumbs, sugar, apples, raisins, and cinnamon.

Finally we rolled up the dough into a long tube, wrapping the layers of dough over onto each other, and folded it into a horseshoe shape to fit on a baking pan in the oven.

We ate the completed strudel for dessert.

I have more apple strudel pictures at Photos on 2023-12-27.

Thursday

I put together two puzzles at my parents' house: a painting depicting the St. Andrews golf course in Scotland (which I neglected to get any pictures of) and a puzzle depicting the covers of a bunch of books that had been banned (or challenged, or something). Although the banned-book puzzle had a thousand pieces, it had the advantage of being a composite of a bunch of visually-distinct images; it wasn't hard to pick out a group of pieces by a color that only appeared one one cover.

Friday

We were scheduled to fly back to San Francisco on Friday when a winter storm rolled into San Francisco (for coastal California values of "winter storm", which mean "wind and rain and fog"), disrupting inbound flights. At various points during the day I checked Flight Aware's air traffic maps around SFO and saw huge stacks of inbound flights circling in holding patterns while air traffic control worked to bring flights into the airport to the south-west on runways 19R and 19L, instead of the normal pattern landing to the north-west on runways 28R and 28L. By the time we arrived at the airport in Pasco our flight had been delayed by an hour, throwing everyone's connecting flights into chaos; the check-in agents were struggling to find replacement flights for everyone out of San Francisco. We were only traveling one hop; all we had to do was check our bags and we didn't need any other airline arrangements for connecting flights beyond SFO.

Our aircraft arrived on time because it was flying from Denver, but it waited on the ground for an extra hour until air traffic control was willing to give it a landing slot in San Francisco. By the time we boarded there were two aircraft on the tarmac heading to different airports, both boarding through the same door. We turned left to reach the flight to San Francisco; if we had turned right we would have ended up in Denver.

By the time we landed in San Francisco, air traffic control had resumed landing flights on runways 28R and 28L. Low gray clouds hung over the airport and everything looked wet.

At baggage claim it appeared that only about a dozen people from our 76-seat aircraft were ending their air travel in San Francisco. We took the people-mover to long-term parking and, as we walked to our car in the older parking garage on the site, I stopped to get a picture of the lights glistening on the rain-soaked pavement.

We stopped for supper at Chipotle in Milbrae, then drove the rest of the way home in the rain.