Dear Mayor Taylor and Council members,
I was very surprised to read that you’re considering cancelling Christmas in our city.
I happen to be Jewish, and like so many people of all faiths or no faith at all, love the Christmas lights and festivities during the dark of winter.
It brightens things up and puts people in a festive mood.
The two tall trees the city has decorated with strands of lights up to the top have been admired by residents and visitors to our city for decades.
I especially love the use of a small number of colored lights for accent among the white lights on our tree in Fremont Park.
The other even taller tree is on the east side of El Camino and used to be lit to the top, a sight to behold. Many of my friends from other cities remarked on its splendor.
Council members, the lights the city puts up at Christmas is one of the very few things our city does that beautifies our downtown, and beauty is uplifting.
Instead, our downtown, full of empty, vacant stores, looks depressing. That is demoralizing for our residents and discourages visitors from shopping here.
For years I’ve beseeched the Council to plant grass back where there’s ugly tanbark in fully half of Fremont Park.
We always had grass there in the past. I know. I’ve lived in the downtown for decades.
At one of the recent concerts in the park, people were crammed onto the small grassy area to sit down. NO ONE was on the tanbark.
We’ve had several wet years in a row so there’s no excuse for the unsightly tanbark any longer.
And I believe there never was a valid excuse, because it’s a small amount of water we’re talking about.
The beauty of the tree lights and of green grass in our downtown may seem unimportant to you, but these are key optics for the city.
Why should people come to Menlo Park when Redwood City, Palo Alto and Los Altos look so much more appealing?
What about our “village charm”? Cancelling that too?
Sincerely,
Cherie Zaslawsky
