It takes a San Francisco December to make you feel the holidays. Like, really feel. Not just that stressful rush to buy the perfect gifts and then wrap them just as neatly or that gleeful and relieved welcome of a long-awaited vacation, but the intensely euphoric feeling that the soulful amalgamation of holiday music and lights and winter and pure spirit ignite. You understand this feeling as December in San Francisco. You don’t really know what the holidays feel like without San Franciscan snowflake lights and decorated wreaths and street music and that tall, stumblingly illuminated tree with the little red star on top. You need a San Francisco Christmas for it to truly feel like Christmas.

It is this city (among other things, of course) that reminds you why you have loved growing up here, that reminds you why you could never leave for too long. Eighteen years and you still have not had enough time to take in the sparkling bay and stretching bridges, the overwhelming fog and the constant, busy hustle… the live street music, the steep, sloping hills, the unfailing bell chimes, the smelly wooden piers surrounded by rippling water (the water.. You can’t imagine not being around water), the clicking of shoe heels, the random Union Square dance offs with the Jesus Christ Loves You picket sign wandering peacefully in the background, the clutched and brightly colored shopping bags, the seasonal ceramic hearts, the squealing fieldtrip groups, the double-decker tour busses and accompanying large cameras, the grassy parks, the ferry rides, the jingle of the cable cars, and the very contours of the towering buildings that gather to make up the most beautiful day and night skyline you think you will ever see, if only because this is the skyline that raised you.

Oops. I think I left my heart.