Christmas Eve Day

[Kytsune]

Christmas Eve day - this'll be a neat one on Mill Avenue.

They have decked the streets with lights, wrapping the trees in a glittering wonderland. They wrap the trunks in rising spirals and drip from the branches in an icicle haze. Gigantic multicolored fir trees of lights hang from the nearby power-transfer station towers. One of them is red-white-to-blue, looking like a flag scrunched up and hung on its she; the other is green and red like a tapestry of candy-cane lights.

People wander the streets aimlessly, the street preachers come out to shout about commercials on TV and nobody listens to them as usual. However, even while the street kids sit, wrapped up against the relative chill, and talk to passersby more people pause to listen and talk to them. They chuckle and laugh at our jokes when we ask for change for booze or debauchery; grin and hang their heads when they have no money -- but offer cigarettes when they have them.

Tourists stand on the corner of 6th street, glaring across the way into the courtyard of Coffee Plantation. The coffee house and the now dead building that one housed Duck Soup are surrounded by a cascade of lighted trees--infighting the crossroads like a Beltane bonfire. The half-light of the Christmas lights illuminates walkers into an ever shifting masquerade pool of people, faces flickering in and out of focus here and there. Suddenly brought into clarity by a flash, and then dimming away into the hustle-and-bustle again.

Smiles all around as we descend into the night.

Hoping, wishing, wondering -- what this New Year has brought and will bring to all of us.

[Guest]