And so the Christmas shopping season begins in earnest

I had the good fortune of visiting a friend in San Jose, California over the Thanksgiving holiday week. She is living in a small, beautiful home owned by dear friends; it’s located at the back of their main house, on their same property. Some folks call these cozy, smaller dwellings “granny flats.”

There was a time when houses in this neighborhood sold for a reasonable amount; the owners of the house where my friend is staying lucked out this way. Many people with ordinary jobs bought homes and lived here—teachers, grocery store managers, nurses. They most likely don’t anymore, not unless they inherited their property or have been here for years. Houses in this neighborhood sell for multi-millions now. You read that right: not hundreds of thousands, but multiple millions. The house where my friend is might fetch 2.8 million dollars, according to Zillow, and it seemed like that estimate was just for the main house, and didn’t include the additional dwelling where my friend is staying at the rear of the property.

This fact gobsmacked me. These are four bedroom, two bath homes. They are lovely—but they are not mansions.

I was able to go for walks around the neighborhood. There is an independently owned bookstore within walking distance, a Boba shop, an ice cream parlor. There are restaurants that sell nearly every kind of food that you can imagine. It was a treat for me, someone who lives in a small town that isn’t served by DoorDash, to go out in the afternoon and wander around and suddenly find myself passing a coffee shop, a donut shop. I grabbed an Oreo Crème Brulee Boba Milk tea one  afternoon, even though I knew that my mile walk wouldn’t burn off the more than 700 calories it held.

Some of the neighborhood homes were starting to put up their Christmas decorations. The house on the corner of my friend’s street had a gigantic blow up turkey in the front yard for Thanksgiving Day. When I left the next day, it was gone and a pile of oversized decorative Christmas packages had taken its place.

It’s a funny thing about Christmas—all of us know that it has gotten commercialized. In the USA, it’s a holiday that revolves around sales and spending. We even have a new holiday now, one that hits the day after Thanksgiving:  Black Friday. Black Friday used to mark the beginning of the Christmas shopping season, but Black Friday sales started weeks earlier this year. The retailers are anxious to get us spending our money. Continue Reading…