Home for the Holidays: Week 2

Week Two of our four-part Gift Guide is here! Have a look inside to find new times from your local vendors.

There is never a bad time to live in an enchanted village, but a certain seasonal swoon amplifies the hometown magic like a loving slap. December arrives with all its largesse. The weather turns cool, ceremonial knit sweaters are pulled over happily mussed hair, and we head out into the evening. There are elaborately strung colored lights, mugs of aromatic mulled wine, and blissful wandering with dear friends under a sparkling canopy of stars, the constellations winking like besotted fools.

The village awakens. Scrims of scented smoke curl gently from woodland chimneys.

The artery that feeds Downtown Montecito is not “Main” or “Maple” Street. It is, improbably, “Coast Village Road.” Coast. Village. Road. The sort of fanciful language that would get a screenwriter dismissed as a daydreaming hack. The northernmost public square is a snug, lamplit enclave of shops and hideaways known as the Upper Village, a luminous piazza of retailers and speakeasies tucked into the Santa Ynez foothills like something out of a Disney sketch.

Too good to be true? Hardly. We’re villagers. Own it.

And where does the almighty shopping algorithm fit into this scene? It doesn’t. This is a rarefied, artisanal community, not a server farm. Leave the online hordes to their e-frenzy. Boutique windows spill light, neighbors wave you inside. Pluck the singular objet d’art that suits your lucky recipient.

Be the village.

Check out our 2025 Holiday Gift Guide, as well as a roundup of rousing local feast ideas!