From the Times archive: first published December 20, 1962. Republished as part of the archive digitization project.
HOLLYWOOD — There is a certain evening, somewhere in the first week of December, when a man may walk out onto the Boulevard after his supper and find that the street has quietly put on its finery while he was not looking. This is that season, and the Boulevard has done it again.
The trees stand once more the length of Santa Claus Lane, green and lit and faintly ridiculous in the warm California dark, their tinsel stirring in a breeze that carries no snow and never has. Above the sidewalk the strings of colored lamps sway between the lamp posts. In the shop windows the merchants have laid out their best under a dusting of cotton batting meant to pass, in the kindly light, for winter.
The custom is an old one here. Since the twenties the parade has come up the Boulevard of a November evening, the sleigh and the whiskered saint aboard it, to open the lane that bears his name and, with it, the season on which the street’s whole year so often turns. The children were out for it again this fall, held up on their fathers’ shoulders, and the merchants watched them from the doorways and did their sums.
For the sums are the anxious half of Christmas on the Boulevard. “You keep the lights burning eleven months,” said Sol Pinsky, who has sold hats and gloves from the same corner for going on thirty years, “and you find out in December whether it was worth the electricity.” He allowed that trade had come slow through the autumn and had picked up, thank heaven, with the trees.
Down the block Mrs. Genevieve Ruiz, who keeps a shop of cards and small gifts, had her window banked with poinsettias and her counter three deep by four o’clock. “They come for the lane,” she said, meaning the trees, “and while they are here they come in out of the cool, and while they are in they buy. God bless the man who thought of the trees.”
Not every hope is met. A season may glitter and still not pay, and more than one proprietor along the street can recite the Decembers that promised much and delivered a January of unsold stock. Yet the faith holds, renewed each year with the lights, that a street made beautiful will be a street made busy, and that the crowd drawn by the free spectacle of the lane will leave a little of its money behind.
By nine the shoppers thin and the Boulevard belongs again to the trees. They keep their watch down the middle of the street, lit and patient, over a season the merchants cannot command and can only, as they have always done, decorate, and wait, and hope.