This website – and my Sunday Recommendations email list – are dedicated to art that’s inspiring, thought-provoking, skillfully executed, and/or breathtakingly beautiful. Once a year, I stretch that to include fabulous events, decorations, clothing, and jewelry on display during the holiday season. Capitalist Christmas pics from previous years are here.
This post is available as a video at https://youtu.be/AHmj6LvyvHQ.
Decorations
I always chuckle over “worlds collide” decorations … In this set-up, the Holy Family seems to be riding in a trailer pulled by a reindeer.
When it comes to Christmas trees, bigger is better! This one is in Orlando’s Mall at Millenia.
We went to see the lights along the Riverwalk, in downtown Tampa. (Snack at Hemingway’s in the Armature Works: best fresh-made chicharrones I’ve ever had!) Half an hour after sunset, the decorations floating on platforms in the river are barely visible. Well, we say, when it gets darker, maybe they’ll seem brighter. So we’re hanging out on the Riverwalk, waiting for the darkness … And then!
For the umpteenth time, the light-festooned Pirate Water Taxi chugs by. But this time it stops by the platform of not-very-visible decorations. A dark figure (arrr, matey!) steps onto the platform. A roar and a growl: the Pirate has turned on the generator that runs the Xmas decorations! In this photo, the Pirate Water Taxi is behind the decorations, toward the right.
And then the Pirate diligently (who knew pirates were diligent?) moves on to light up the next platform.
Clothing
Practicality aside (I have never not regretted wearing white pants), I love the look of this cream satin outfit.
Shoes … hmmm. Maybe one of these.
Or, because my toes aren’t pointy, and because you could still wear these in Florida in December …
And of course, something to lounge around in. The variations on the Christmas theme are amazing.
Events
Boynton Beach greeted me with dancers …
…. and very young violinists …
… and I have no idea what these are – but they make me laugh out loud. The performers were from a kung fu school in a Boynton Beach strip mall.
Winter Village rink at the Tampa Riverwalk. How amazing is it to be able to do ice skating outdoors, when the night-time temps are in the 60s and daytime highs in the 80s?
The only snow my husband wants to deal with, unless he’s on skis.
Tampa’s Boat Parade, just before Christmas, is the area’s largest.
Sometimes the best event is one you make yourself.
What Christmas means to me
Ayn Rand, 1976:
A national holiday, in this country, cannot have an exclusively religious meaning. The secular meaning of the Christmas holiday is wider than the tenets of any particular religion: it is good will toward men—a frame of mind which is not the exclusive property (though it is supposed to be part, but is a largely unobserved part) of the Christian religion.
The charming aspect of Christmas is the fact that it expresses good will in a cheerful, happy, benevolent, non-sacrificial way. One says: “Merry Christmas”—not “Weep and Repent.” And the good will is expressed in a material, earthly form—by giving presents to one’s friends, or by sending them cards in token of remembrance . . . .
The best aspect of Christmas is the aspect usually decried by the mystics: the fact that Christmas has been commercialized. The gift-buying . . . stimulates an enormous outpouring of ingenuity in the creation of products devoted to a single purpose: to give men pleasure. And the street decorations put up by department stores and other institutions—the Christmas trees, the winking lights, the glittering colors—provide the city with a spectacular display, which only “commercial greed” could afford to give us. One would have to be terribly depressed to resist the wonderful gaiety of that spectacle.
Ayn Rand, The Objectivist Calendar, Dec. 1976, quoted in the Ayn Rand Lexicon
More
- For Capitalist Christmas albums from 2016 and later, see here. The albums for earlier years are on Facebook: 2015, 2014, 2013 (part 1 and part 2), 2011, and 2010. I somehow missed 2012.
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