London Christmas Lights

As we did last year, we took a walking tour of much of Central London to look at the Christmas windows of the various stores as well as the street holiday lighting. Thankfully, when we did it this year (on the 22nd) it was much warmer than the freezing weather we had on our Christmas Eve foray last year.

As we did last year, we started with the windows at Harrod's, the famous, VERY up-scale store whose Christmas windows are lengendary. Last year's, while having nothing to do with the purpose or spirit of Christmas, were at least very beautiful. This year's, in our view, were very disappointing -- as usual, they did not reflect the Christmas story, but they were also not very pretty or impressive. Oh, well -- no one hits a home run every time.

The famous food-specialty store, Fortnum and Mason, had some very interesting windows this year -- in the form of scenes from Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol", with Scrooge acting out various parts of the story.

As was also the case last year, our companions were David and Leora Comis (David is the Commanding Officer of ONR Global). This annual tour was actually Leora's idea last year, based on her New York family's tradition of visiting the lights of Manhattan at Christmas. We also introduced a new wrinkle this year by stopping part way through the walk to have dinner at a favorite Italian restaurant -- Kathi thought that was a big improvement.

If you'd like to see a few more pictures of the London scene, go to: http://chuck.smugmug.com/gallery/1077747