The holidays. Whoa. There is definitely more emotion filled with them each year you get older.
I never understood those songs about being alone on Christmas or wishing to come home for Christmas when I was a kid. I was a kid in frozen Chicago, why not be somewhere else? But, golly gee, tradition and family is all I want.
Luckily, my surrogate midwestern family is close by and treat me like I was one of them.
We went to an old Bolinas home, right on the cliff and celebrated solstice with a roast pig (the pig procured from the neighbor). This place is incredible. J collects antiques and if you excavate her parking lot, you may find hundreds of Heath Ceramics tiles buried in the mud.
This was the true Bolinas, these families who acquired these properties years ago and never let go. Cliff side properties 30 miles from San Francisco and all so isolated and remote. Still no phone service. You have to love it. West Marin hippies abound. A contact high is inevitable.
I have this new daydream to be in West Marin long enough to gain access and trust to photograph these amazing homes and make a book of them. As there is not a day that goes by when I don't find some little ewok village in the middle of the woods somewhere.
Kyle, Ed and Tori were 100% on page for going to walk up the hills of Stinson Beach and see homey homes filled with Christmas lights and trees. I love that they love this as much as I. Kyle appropriately called it "Christmas Voyeurism". Exactement! My people.
There is something about peering into well put together homes and pretending for a second that it was your home filled with family and friends.
That being said, I get to celebrate solstice with this family and lord, I am blessed for them and every thing they bring to the table.
Count your blessings, just count 'em, that's where it's at...