new year Pasadena style by Bill Kay

"Don't forget to tune in on New Year's Eve, folks, for our fuck special!" That got my attention, watching breakfast TV over the weekend. But it was Fox TV and I had merely misheard the Californian broadcast accent and they were in fact puffing the station's NY Eve Fox Special, but it seemed fitting somehow: they get excited about 31 Dec in these parts.
You are particularly aware of the New Year phenomenon if you live in Pasadena. Driving down the town's main drag, Colorado Boulevard, early afternoon on NY Eve was a jaw-dropping experience just to see the sheer number of people camped out for the huge Tournament of Roses Parade which is held every NY Day morning. I had been told that people often claimed their spaces overnight, possibly coming on from a boozy party, but that doesn't begin to do it justice. The hundreds of people in place had clearly been there since some time over the weekend. Folding chairs were neatly laid out as far as the eye could see. Families played, adults read or played cards, meals were cooked, some slept. Not sure where they went for washing and going to the loo, probably the nearest Jack-in-the-Box or Burger King, but everyone was very relaxed so it clearly wasn't a problem.
These placid scenes were in stark contrast to last week's news, of a drug-driven shooting in the main shopping segment of that same Colorado Boulevard, in what is rather prissily known as Old Pasadena, an area that used to be a rundown slum dominated by thugs and hobos. They have long gone, replaced by throngs of twentysomethings with nothing more sinister in mind than getting drunk on a Saturday night. So it came as something of shock to discover that a carload of drug-users had driven down from nearby Altadena and a row between two of them had led to a gun being drawn at 7.30 on Wednesday evening, when the streets were crowded with shoppers. Four shots were fired. One went into the victim's back, but at least one went across the street into a shop window, incredibly without hitting anyone on the way.
That prompted soothing words from Bill Bogaard, Pasadena's pollyanna-ish mayor, to the effect that it was a one-off and not the start of a trend. It had better not be, or some of America's biggest store chains will suffer an even bigger downturn in business than already faces them in 2008 from the subprime mortgage meltdown. However, unlike Los Angeles, gun crime and murders are on the increase in Pasadena, particularly the north-west corner where the blacks and Latinos are in the sort of toe-to-toe turf wars that have blighted such LA suburbs as Compton, Fullerton and Long Beach in recent years. It may be catch-up time.
All this has overshadowed Christmas, which seems to have been squeezed between Thanksgiving and New Year. Christmas is still a public holiday, the banks and public services are shut, and so are quite a few retailers and restaurants. But there is the ever-sensitive religious/racial problem that Christmas is a Christian festival and there are no mandatory holidays for other religions. So it has been generally diluted to Happy Holidays, a phrase which can be and often is stretched to cover everything from Halloween to New Year, take it to mean whatever you want it to mean.
There is also a degree of exhaustion by the time the US gets to Christmas. Celebrations, and the accompanying consumer advertising blitz, have been in full flow for at least three months by then, and of course everyone is conscious of the need to keep something in reserve for the big New Year push.
Last year, our first Christmas in the US since we came here to live, was pretty quiet as we didn't get involved in our friends' gatherings. This year we went to two parties, both for adults who either didn't have families or wanted to escape families. They were both very relaxed, informal, convivial affairs that marked Christmas without it becoming an emotional and logistical boot camp. Perfect.
Now we are off to Cantalini's, an atmospheric, traditional Italian restaurant at Playa del Rey, a small beachside holiday village near LAX that seems to have been frozen in time since the 1950s.
Ironically, one of our friends in London has been effectively imprisoned in her home for New Year because a friend's family had to make a hasty exit from their home to escape an armed gangland revenge attack. So California had no monopoly on violent crime in 2007, and I suspect that will be all the truer in 2008.