Home for the Holidays: Week 1

Autumnal Gifting Enlightenment This Holiday Season

Another year gone by! And here comes that truly peaceful December closure – a month-long fare thee well to 2025 as we gather, reminisce, and mark the nourishing passage of time.

Expect a light snowfall, Victorian carolers on every street corner in their cozy scarves and mufflers and top hats. One of these carolers will be (inevitably) ringing a bell, an affront to the champagne headache you’ll be nursing, but only for the entire month. Magical talking snowmen will be roaming the lamplit village in the silent sifting snowfall, cheerily waving their stick arms and frightening the kids. Chimney sweeps singing in unison will high step along the rooflines, homeowners craning necks and smiling with difficulty as they furiously calculate the cost of repairing their wrecked shingles and ridge cap.

The Holidays are for many the season of giving. Remember a time when exchanged gifts included twine dolls and oranges? Well, not much has changed. The twine is of a higher quality, of course. But if a strange (but well-meant) little figurine made of twine isn’t on your wish list this year, you’re in luck. As you’ve likely noticed reader, we are all in luck. It is our common good fortune – particularly this time of year – that Montecito is not just a village in name, but in fact. We inhabit an actual forested hamlet whose shoppes’ gently-lit windows beckon. Go to them. You don’t need the mails, algorithms, or digitally-ordered flapdoodle. Your village awaits in these very pages.

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See your local holiday gift lis here!