Under the Palms

Started: 2026-01-04 15:38:31

Submitted: 2026-01-04 15:19:17

Visibility: World-readable

Ice skating in downtown San Jose

One of the holiday-adjacent activities I offered to my kids was ice skating, on the theory that it requires cold weather so therefore it's connected to winter and therefore the winter holidays. In the Bay Area it doesn't actually freeze (we have to visit seasons if we want to experience any) but there are a couple of pop-up skating rinks for the season. There's an outdoor skating rink in Union Square in San Francisco, next to the massive Christmas tree. It turned out there's also an outdoor rink in downtown San Jose, closer to home, built around a group of palm trees in a square; so they called this "skating under the palms".

Through some job-related shenanigans I didn't have much to do the last week before Christmas, so I when I spotted a break in the series of rain on the last Friday before Christmas, on the afternoon after Julian got out of school early for the winter holidays, I asked Julian if he wanted to go skating and he agreed.

(I don't really go to downtown San Jose very much. While walking to the skating rink I realized that the last time I walked in front of the convention center was when I attended Worldcon in San Jose at the convention center in 2018.)

Ice skating under the palms in San Jose

I am not sure that I've gone skating (of any type) at any point in the last 25 years. I'm sure I went ice skating as a kid, but most of my experience skating was in-line skating as a teen. (It's the nineties, go for it.) I quickly remembered enough of the basic technique that I was able to skate competently around the small rink. It was a weekday afternoon and the rink was sparsely populated; most of the other people looked like teens and young adults, some of whom looked like they were skating for the first time, egged on by their friends or dates.

Julian, on the other hand, has never gone skating of any kind as far as I know. He was shaky balancing on the skates on the rubber deck, and remained shaky when we stepped onto the ice. He couldn't quite figure out how to stand without his skates slipping out from under him, and my attempts at describing the basic technique didn't work very well. (Knowing the technique, being able to describe the technique, and teaching the technique are three different things.) We made one shaky lap around the rink with Julian holding onto the railing with one hand and me with the other hand, and then stepped off the rink to practice walking back and forth on the deck, just to figure out how to balance on the single line of the skates. I got Julian a walker so he could have something to hold on to while skating to to help him balance, but it didn't slide very well on the marginal ice (now that I think about it, maybe it should have had metal skates on the bottom rather than trying to slide on plastic) and Julian couldn't figure it out. After another lap (and my attempts to explain how to kick with an angled foot to push forward) I let Julian give up, and I took another few laps on my own.

Jaeger ice-skating in San Jose

As a consolation prize we picked up a bag of caramel kettle corn at the Christmas festival in downtown San Jose and snacked on the popcorn as we walked through Christmas trees decorated by various local businesses and other organizations.

Christmas trees decorated in downtown San Jose

I should try taking Julian to our local roller skating rink to give him some practice with skating when he doesn't have to balance (and hopefully the other stakes are lower, because he'll be on a regular wood floor not ice), then I can see if he's up to trying ice skating again.