Christmas Letter 2025

I hope you who don’t celebrate Christmas will indulge me. Or just skip this one and I’ll see you January 1st!

To those of you who are fa-la-la-ing or in the midst of your sacred reflections, I don’t want to keep you long.

This week’s San Francisco Story has a few nice photos of folks celebrating over the years courtesy of the San Francisco History Center of the San Francisco Public Library. If you’re not familiar with the library’s growing digital archives you might want to browse them at halftime of the game.

We do Christmas here. I grew up a Catholic and acquisitive boy, so December 25th was always a big part of my life.

My birthday, of course, was also anticipated, but it didn’t have the pageantry that set Christmas apart. And the haul was so much greater with Christmas, mostly thanks to our attentive and indulgent grandmother who figured out just what we wanted from King Norman’s Kingdom of Toys on Clement Street.

Of course, Christmas isn’t about getting things, but most kids don’t know that. Shiny new bikes and Santa Claus can confound even the best of us.

Nancy has booked us a table at Waterfront restaurant tonight for dinner with Miranda and Jasper, Brady and David. Maybe there will be ice skating afterwards and a whole new tradition started. 

We already have a Christmas Eve tradition. Friends come to our house and Nancy whips up “shepherd’s pie” like her mother always used to make on that night. The recipe is something like hamburger, instant mashed potatoes, canned green beans, and Campbell's tomato soup mixed in.

Fresh anything ruins it completely.

We all cheerfully put up with it, especially since Nancy makes extra versions to accommodate vegans, vegetarians, and the green-bean/mushroom-adverse.

She’s great.

This is A Christmas Carol and Scrooge time. I’ve always been a Charles Dickens fan since I found a paperback copy of Our Mutual Friend on a 15 Third Street bus back in the very early 1980s.

Whose copy was it? Where were they going? Had they finished and just left it for me to discover? No answers.

But I got hooked on the story of the golden dustman. Because I worked at Waldenbooks on Geary Street back then I had instant access to jump into David Copperfield, Bleak House, Great Expectations...

When Nancy and I started dating, she gave me a hard time about my appreciation of “dead white male authors.”

In my defense, I like some living white male authors.

A little joke there.

A non-Christmas anecdote:

One summer while on tour with Kloons on Ice (San Francisco’s greatest three-person comedy juggling troupe...at the time), I was unhappily reading Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Hardy is no Dickens, but I stuck with it like a good altar boy.

When I finished somewhere in Oregon, somewhere on Highway 101, my disgust with the ending impelled me to hurl Tess out the Volvo’s window.

(I was a passenger. Texting while driving is bad; reading Penguin Classics behind the wheel, while somewhat more edifying, is worse.)

You see how discriminating I really am, and now perhaps we have an explanation of how paperback books are found in wild places.

Back to Christmas Carol…

The story of a man who misses life’s point to focus on the acquisition of money is particularly appropriate now. We have lots of billionaires becoming more billion-airey, but who want even more. Some of them are dabbling in San Francisco affairs, some are good men of business.

(Jacob Marley: “Mankind was my business!”)

Our mainstream news and our own personal feeds (hey, I’m on BlueSky now), usually ignore the big issue: that the vast majority of this earth’s inhabitants struggle.

(Ghost of Christmas Present showing the children of Man: “This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy.”)

Being charitable in giving and in deeds is pretty easy. One generally feels good afterwards.

What is way harder—something I am always struggling with—is to be charitable to people determined to accept ignorance and to condone the marginalization and persecution of others for their own comfort or profit.

They seem to be everywhere these days, even in San Francisco. 

Well, I’ll keep working on it. Do me a favor and give me a heads-up if you observe me getting a bit snippy or snide.

Back to Nancy…

An important part of our courtship occurred with Christmas Carol back in 1992.

In our 20s, with unconventional career paths, we both needed extra money, so we both ushered at ACT’s annual production of “A Christmas Carol.” It was staged at the Orpheum Theater at 8th and Market Streets, because the Geary Theater was still closed due to damage from the 1989 earthquake.

We had lots of time to talk in the lobby during the show, some moments to make out in the third balcony while Scrooge danced with the Fezziwigs.

So just as Die Hard is a Christmas movie to many, Christmas Carol is a love story to me. Lines from the script have returned to me often in our 30+ years together:

“There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited.”

“Bear but a touch of my hand, and you shall be upheld in more than this.”

“As good as Gold and better...”

So the season and the story remind me to have love for the world, love for any individuals within my reach, but they are reinforced by my finding the great love of my life. Some of us are so very lucky in this world.

Merry Christmas, Nancy.

Merry Christmas to you all.

Next week we’ll get back to the regular history stuff.

Woody Christmas Cheer Fund

Thanks to the generosity of Ed F. (F.O.W.) and Mary J. (who I went to grammar school with!), I have Woody bucks to spend on you. We can get a hot chocolate or a cider or an ale or a wassail. As long as we chat together like the two (or three? or more?) friendly people we are.

Here’s to a 2025 as good as we can make it together.