Happy Holidays from Dayton, Ohio!

Merry Christmas everyone! Scot and I are visiting Scot’s family in Dayton, OH, where it’s a green Christmas. We left the snow back home in Boston. We did our Christmas gift exchange last night and have been enjoying a lazy Christmas morning sipping mimosas and watching the cats get a little crazy on catnip.

I am mystified by the Dayton-area; so incredibly built up commercially with huge malls and endless chain restaurants. Who is doing the shopping and eating out here? I can’t imagine the economy of Dayton can support all this commercialism, yet every two years when we come out here for Christmas there are more new malls… and they’re enormous! Check out The Greene, where we had dinner on Sunday night. It’s set up like a little downtown area, where various musical events and other outdoor activities go on during the nicer weather. Scot actually found it to be a bit more like Disney World than a downtown area. We had dinner at Dayton’s first Cheesecake Factory, a restaurant Scot’s mother quite enjoyed when she visited Boston. It was pretty busy, and again, all I could think of was how many people does it take to support all these restaurants? Could the Hooters down the street actually be busy too?