Christmas in Santa Cruz
Started: 2025-01-18 21:25:46
Submitted: 2025-01-18 23:28:38
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A cozy low-key Christmas at home in Santa Cruz
For Christmas this year our regular family holiday rotation indicated that we would visit Kiesa's family in Washington for Christmas. Instead of our regular plan, though, we arranged to meet on the Big Island of Hawaii the week of New Year's. This left us to have Christmas by ourselves at home in Santa Cruz.
I only had enough vacation time to take off the time we were going to spend in Hawaii, so I was planning on working the week of Christmas (in part because I only got Christmas Day off, plus New Year's Eve and New Year's Day as holidays). But in appreciation for my company collectively hitting a big important milestone in our big important project our leadership encouraged us to take the week of Christmas off so we would come back refreshed in the new year ready to work on the next milestone. I learned this in mid-December, by which point we had already scheduled our trip to Hawaii and it didn't seem like we could throw together a last-minute trip to do anything like visit snow for Christmas. (Some members of my family feel deprived that we do not live in a climate with real seasons, and wish we could see snow more often. There is a correlation between the people who have this opinion and the people who are reticent to leave the house for any reason. I am ambivalent on the idea of visiting snow for its own sake but I do like skiing and I wish it were easier to get there from here.) So the end result was that we stayed at home the week of Christmas without any specific plans to go anywhere.
The one holiday-involved event we did this year was to attend a local production of A Christmas Carol put on by Santa Cruz Shakespeare. The production took much of the original narration from the text and assigned it to members of the cast to recite. (A day or two before seeing the play I had listened to an episode of a podcast that specifically cited the "dead as a doornail" line in the narration as an example of Dickens' prose that was usually lost in dramatic adaptations of the story.) The narration filled in the gaps in the sparse staging, and introduced characters played by actors who portrayed multiple people during the production. I enjoyed watching the play as part of my holiday observance.
On Monday, the 23rd of December, I went for a hike in Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park, starting at the Rincon trailhead on the side of highway 9 between Santa Cruz and Felton. From the trailhead a gravel road descended to the San Lorenzo River. I followed the trail up the river bank until it disappeared in the forest, then headed back to my car at the trailhead.
On Monday afternoon a large wave destroyed the end of the Santa Cruz Wharf and scattered debris on the beaches to the east. I visited Seabright Beach to see the results for myself on Tuesday, Christmas Eve; and I intend to post my pictures separately.
To keep myself occupied for the holiday week I pulled out a 1000-piece puzzle of the Golden Gate Bridge and began to assemble it. (This puzzle is part of a set of scenic puzzles from American cities. I last assembled the puzzle in the pandemic winter of 2020-2021, while we were living at the top of the Santa Cruz Mountains.) By the time I got to the sky, the last part of the puzzle I assembled because the pieces were the hardest to distinguish, I began to brute-force the puzzle but eventually realized that the puzzle pieces were built with a regular pattern of four different shapes of pieces tessellated together. The pieces were not exactly identical, but they were close enough that pieces would seem to fit in the wrong place; and then I'd pick up the piece and move it four spaces to the side and it'd fit better. This let me reduce the search space of the puzzle pieces by a considerable factor: I could sort each piece by shape, and make reasonable guesses about its orientation in the puzzle, so I really only needed to try one-quarter of the pieces in each space.
I made enough progress with the puzzle that I made a trip to Bookshop Santa Cruz on Christmas Eve, braving the pre-Christmas crowds, to buy a new puzzle. I selected a 1000-piece puzzle with all of the major characters from Discworld in one picture. I started this puzzle as soon as I finished the Golden Gate Bridge. This puzzle proved tricky because the color palette wasn't especially varied across the picture, so it was hard to sort the pieces to find most of the people. There was something in the scale of the pieces relative to the characters that made it difficult to extrapolate what missing pieces would look like. But I kept going, and by the time I reached the end I could pick up a piece, figure out where it was supposed to go, and put it in the right place. This puzzle lasted the rest of the week until Friday night.
Our Christmas celebration began with cheese fondue on Christmas Eve. Since Calvin often stays up to midnight it seemed important to clarify the rule around whether one could open one's stocking right at midnight, or if one needed to wait until one woke up. In the tradition of staying up to meet Santa, I decided it would be appropriate to open stockings any time after midnight. (The left-most stocking is for Rio. She wasn't able to pull the stocking down from the mantle, but she did get cat toys in her stocking.)
On Christmas morning we opened our stockings (despite my rule clarification no one got up at midnight). Kiesa and I both saw the same gift guide from The Verge and both followed the link to a line of Nessie-inspired silicone kitchen utensils and ordered a baby nessie tea infuser to give each other. We ate Christmas breakfast then headed upstairs to the Christmas tree at the apex of the family room, visible outside when the shades were open, to open presents. Rio appreciated the left over gift wrapping.
Julian wanted to play Nintendo Switch with me and Calvin, so we played split-screen Mario Cart against an assortment of automated opponents. After an hour I took my leave and went to walk on Seabright Beach, which was still strewn with wreckage from the pier, and filled with people climbing around the wreckage and just strolling along the beach on the sunny winter afternoon.
I returned to help put Christmas dinner on the table, then we sat down to eat. Kiesa made a lentil Wellington as the main dish, which was an interesting dish, along with a full menu which she discussed in detail on her own blog.
Every member of the family got Legos for Christmas, so we set up space in the living room for the boys to work on their new sets while I worked on the Discworld puzzle.
We didn't end up going anywhere but we had a quiet relaxing Christmas at home in Santa Cruz.