San Francisco Christmas Spirit

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But now on to Christmas memories. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, in a small town called Pacheco. Almost every Christmas we traveled the 25 miles to the Big City where my father's sister, my Aunt Mary lived. Aunt Mary never had children, though she'd had about three husbands. She was a Registered Nurse, but also a free spirit who wore turbans and dangly earrings. Her laugh was uproarious. She was my Auntie Mame.

Aunt Mary as nurse

Christmas in San Francisco was magical to a child: the creeping fogs, the groan of the foghorn out in the bay, and Macy's department store with the huge decorated tree in the store's center.

Not Macy's but similar.

When older, my brother and I would leave the chattering adults and roam the city. We'd ride the clanging cable cars down to Fisherman's Wharf. A freedom most children couldn't enjoy today. I loved the old Victorian buildings, the bustle of the trollies, the fat sea lions grunting on the pier.

The city was decorated with ribbons and tinsel. Giant Christmas ornaments hung from the street lights. The store windows looked like Christmas scenes out of a storybook.

We'd wander through China Town, with the shops set up on the sidewalks.

By the time we returned to our aunt's apartment, a delicious dinner would be served. My beloved aunt and brother are long gone but I'll always have these wonderful memories from my childhood.

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For more information on me and my books, please visit my website: www.dianescottlewis.org

 

Diane Scott Lewis grew up in California, traveled the world with the navy, edited for magazines and an on-line publisher. She lives with her husband in Pennsylvania.

An adventurous childhood in Northern California by Diane Scott Lewis

 

 

Available in 2018

Since I’ve already spoken of my childhood visit to British Columbia, I can’t wax nostalgic about Canada, so I’ll have to talk of my girlhood in a small town in California.

I grew up in the village of Pacheco, which had been an important place in the 1800’s, a commercial center with access to shipping. But by the time I came along, in the 1950’s, it was a tiny town with a mom and pop grocery store, a candy store, the Pacheco Inn (a bar), drug store, and the bowling alley. Of all those places, only the bowling alley is left.

 

We didn’t get our first traffic light until I was sixteen, something my husband often teases me about.

Pacheco is twenty-seven miles north-east of San Francisco. My wonderfully flamboyant Aunt Mary lived in that great metropolis, so when my family visited her my brother and I spent many days roaming the city, riding cable cars and exploring Fisherman’s Warf.


Brother, Scott

Surrounded by farms in Pacheco, we lived in Country Club Homes, which sounds much grander than it actually was. It’s tract homes with cookie-cutter houses on asphalt roads. No wonder in my novels I write about quant half-timbered cottages on crooked, cobbled lanes.

Our life was still quite rural. We kept pigeons on the roof, chickens in the yard, and sheltered stray cats with kittens in cardboard boxes.

Best friend Candy, and author, 1964

My best friend and I would walk everywhere, feed apples to a horse named Chief, pick apricots and pomegranates from trees.

My friends and I rode our own horses along the country roads, and into the fields, racing through landscape now built up with houses.

The hills above Pacheco were lush, green and full of grazing cows—now condos scar the landscape.

A creek flowed through the town and on into the next, with a dirt road on both sides. We once played with snapping crawdads in the summer and watched tiny frogs emerge like a marching army. The creek is filled in today, no trace left.

We attended the local elementary school, a rambling pink stucco structure now torn down. Below is the mural I helped to draw of our school when I was in sixth grade.

 

I’m not sad (well sometimes) about these changes, only disappointed for the children currently growing up there . I know life must move forward, but I’m grateful I lived my childhood when I did, when it was wild and rural.


Author at sixteen, front yard of childhood home, 1970

 

To find out more about Diane Scott Lewis and my novels, please visit my BWL Author page

or my website: dianescottlewis.org