San Diego Snow Globe

Meteorology is the branch of science that studies changes in the atmosphere, so by meteorological standards San Diego is one of the most boring places on the planet. The weather for the five months I spent interning there after I graduated from college in 1990 was relentlessly perfect -- mid- to upper-seventies and sunny every day. So by the time I prepared to head back east, songs like "Let It Snow" had an entirely different meaning to me. Let it snow? Heck, let a cloud pass overhead. Anything resembling weather or seasonal variability would have suited me.

Perhaps this explains one of the happiest moments of my time in San Diego: It was summer and I was at a shopping mall, hunting through a bin of heavily discounted cassette tapes at a record store, when I found a copy of the Vince Guaraldi Trio's music from "A Charlie Brown Christmas." It was the best $2 or $3 I ever spent. I played that tape over and and over as I drove up and down The Five. Who cared if Christmas was four or five months away? I cranked up the volume and the AC and could almost imagine the smell of fireplaces in the night air. It might have been 77 degrees outside my white Mercury Sable, but inside my little snow globe it was Christmas time.

So I have some appreciation for those who have unseasonable yearnings for Yule. And yet my feelings were very mixed on Thursday, Nov. 9, when I stopped by my local Starbucks on my way to work and saw that the coffee of the day was Christmas Blend and that the tell-tale red holiday cups were already out.

With 46 Shopping Days still left until Christmas?! These days, actually, just over six weeks constitutes commercial restraint.

I happen to like Christmas Blend, but I especially admire the craft that Starbucks puts into describing it, emphasizing the blend's "coziness" and its "joyful, spicy warmth" in a description on its Web site. The wording alone stirs my holiday spirit.

My wife, Christine, and I have decided to devote this blog to looking at Christmas Marketing -- not because we have have some sort of purist indignation about the crass commercialization of a holiday we look forward to, but because we appreciate it when it is done well. And so much Christmas marketing is, well, bad. That's what we plan to celebrate here -- at least for the next six weeks. So happy holidays!