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This website is 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. 

Italy

I visited Italy in early January 2024. The weather wasn’t great but the crowds were manageable – and the Christmas decorations were still up!

Celebrity Constellation

In December 2024, for the first time in a decade, my husband and I went on a cruise. Here’s the main foyer of the Celebrity Constellation.

I haven’t a clue what’s going on in this scene: is it “every decoration that didn’t fit elsewhere”? Festively flashy, though.

One of the restaurants aboard the Constellation is Le Petit Chef, where a video is projected on the plate and table before each course. It’s very amusing, and even more importantly, the food was the best prepared, the tastiest, and the most innovative that we had on board. This is a projection of a lobster: the course as it was served was rather different.

New Orleans

First stop on the cruise: New Orleans, which has some very elegant decorations.

A Mardi Gras/Christmas mash-up.

But the image that I’m afraid (!) will stick in my memory is Voodoo Santa.

Mexico

The Constellation also made two stops in Mexico: Cozumel and Punta Maya. I was off the ship for about 20 minutes in Punta Maya: there’s not much there, unless you want to go on an excursion to Mayan ruins. These photos are from Cozumel.

La Choza has a tiki-hut-style roof and authentic Mexican cuisine that’s quite delicious. My husband loved the chicken mole.

Tampa

And finally, a pic from Tampa International, one of my favorite airports.

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.
• For my current work-in-progress, Timeline 1700-1900, see my Substack page.