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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/F-NGHi3octk

Shops at Wiregrass, Wesley Chapel, Florida

Fake snow and fireworks, in 75-degree weather near Tampa.

Busch Gardens, Tampa, Florida

I was wowed by the Wiregrass tree, but the one at Busch Gardens has even more sophisticated lighting.

At the Alhambra they have a very good ice-skating show. As a former New Yorker, it was fun to “revisit” the Gapstow Bridge and the Plaza!

A guiding star … or a terrifying one, if you’re not into roller coasters. I think this one is the Cheetah.

Busch Gardens is famed for its roller coasters. The red-and-green structure at right is part of the Iron Gwazi, lit up for Christmas.

St. Augustine, Florida

They do love their outdoor lighting in St. Augustine.

Build-up for the Christmas tree below: Henry Morrison Flagler (1830-1913) became enormously wealthy as one of the founders of Standard Oil, which he joined in 1867. In the late 1870s, Flagler visited Florida with his sick wife. Perhaps not surprisingly, given that he grew up near Rochester, New York, Flagler fell in love with Florida’s warmth and sunshine. He became the state’s most tireless promoter. In 1882, he gave up his day-to-day involvement with Standard Oil and began construction of a 540-room hotel in St. Augustine: the Ponce de Leon. Its exterior was the work of Carrère & Hastings, who later designed the New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd St. The interior design team was headed by Louis Comfort Tiffany, who made the stained glass windows in the dining room. The Ponce was one of the first buildings in the US to be wired for electricity as it was being built.

The Ponce de Leon is now home to Flagler College, but its entrance foyer is still grand. More on Henry Flagler here, in the first of my posts on the Flagler Museum in Palm Beach. More on the Ponce here.

Always look up.

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

Silly Christmas

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.
• Want wonderful art delivered weekly to your inbox? Check out my Sunday Recommendations list: details here.