Family Storybook: Christmas Tree Lighting

There are moments in life that get packaged into “A Tale” rather than just “a story”. You tell it practically the same way each time you share it, and you tend to share it a lot. Each new person you meet, they’re going to hear your Tales as part of the get-to-know-you process. Here is our tale of meeting our city for the first time.

We could roll back time reaaaaally far to get to the beginning of this thread; like all the way to our first inkling of moving. When we were kinda-sorta serious about moving to Portugal but no firm plans at all, one of the things we kept chewing on was when we were going to actually pull up stakes and go. A lot of that was “when can we afford it” and “when can we logistically manage it” and so on, but a thought began to percolate for me. We were moving to a new city, in a new country, knowing basically nothing about them. The culture would be different, the customs, the food, everything. So, how could we increase the chance that we’d like being there? And the answer I came up with was “go at Christmas time.” Not that Lisa and I are particular Christmas lovers, but you can’t ignore how the seasonal cheer ramps up. Downtown will be covered in lights. Music everywhere. People generally rolling friendliness saves with advantage. (Sorry, non-nerds.) Yeah, that seemed like the best way to stack the deck in our favor.

So a hundred dominoes falling later, we actually went to San Francisco for Thanksgiving in 2021 with portions of Lisa’s family, then caught our flight from SFO to Lisbon. We got to our first night airbnb, then into our apartment the next day. We were absolutely pooooped. Exhausted. But, we’d heard from the Braga American immigrants group that the municipal tree lighting festivity would be going on that night and the immigrants would grab a table at Café Vianna to catch the goings on. (To my fellow immigrants reading this in 2025 and beyond: yes, that’s right, the entire crowd of immigrants that night fit around a 10-top at Café Vianna. How times change, right?) It seemed like a good way to meet people and also just crack the ice on seeing what we’d got ourselves into. We left our apartment around 7 or so and made the 15-ish minute walk to downtown.

That’s how long it took me to fall in love with this place. 15 minutes.

Our old apartment was on Rua Dom Pedro V, which goes through a couple of quick name changes before becoming Avenida Central; don’t worry about the details if you don’t get this, all that matters is it was a straight line walk for us to end up at the fountain for the tree lighting. You hit the pedestrian area halfway there, and that’s when it started. Picturesque family scenes as the locals started gathering for the festivities. This was late 2021, remember, so things were juuuuust starting to loosen up in public spaces. They hadn’t even had the tree lighting the year prior, and attendance was relatively sparse but the people who were showing up seemed extra-excited to be reconnecting with their community. The air was crisp, the lights were on all up and down the pedestrian zone… it was, in a word, perfect. It was exactly what you’d want from the start of the holiday season. The gathering at the cafe was as warm a welcome as two new arrivals could hope for, and we’re friends with, I think, everybody we met that night.

The best part to me is that none of this is revisionist history. As we were walking back to our apartment at the end of the night we talked about what a great night it was, how much we loved the experience and the people that we met. Looking back, even knowing that we basically psyched ourselves out (picking the best possible time to “meet” our new home, going to festive occasions etc…) we still feel like it was a perfect first impression. And it seems to have worked, because here we are.