D.C.’s Southern efficiency and Northern charm can finally be experienced in a truly Southern environment:

Fifteen years of warm winter weather is beginning to change the Washington area’s landscape — with Southern species like crape myrtles having an easier time and northern types feeling less welcome, according to findings by the National Arbor Day Foundation.

The foundation has revised its map of “hardiness zones” — with each of the nine zones showing a range of average annual low temperatures that help serve as a guide for gardeners and others.

One big change was that the entire Washington area was reclassified in the same zone as parts of Texas and North Carolina. In 1990, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the region sat on the border of the northern and southern zones.

“You could say D.C. is the new North Carolina,” said Bill McLaughlin, a curator at the U.S. Botanic Garden on the Mall.

One of the latest Obama articles notes:

A CNN poll last week found that 60 percent of Americans said they have no reservations about voting for a black president, although experts caution that polls are not always a reliable measure of racial bias. Some wonder whether whites who now are urging him to run will be as enthusiastic in the voting booth.

A ceiling of sixty percent is an awfully low percent to start with. Granted, the survey is of Americans, and not the electorate, but given that the electorate is whiter on average than the population, it does raise real questions about how Obama is going to go about making sure the electorate is composed of people who’ll give him a fair shake. To win a general-election contest he would need to change the rules of the game, and also transform the electorate itself. How would he go about doing that? It’s awfully early yet, but it seems to be that question is going to be as important as any questions folks might have about his experience.

The New York Times had a nice little holiday piece about Christmas envy from the Jewish perspective, while The Washington Post featured the Hindu American perspective as its version of the hearty holiday feature staple of a minority religious view on our Christian nation’s most vivid annual ritual. At my brother’s house, we combined all three religions, for our annual German Jewish-Hindu Christmas celebration, replete with beautiful tree, bountiful presents, and one of the most amazing shrimp dishes I’ve ever tasted, a South Indian recipe of tiger shrimp dusted in curry powder and then sauted in a sauce of tamarind pulp, diced garlic, black peppercorns, mustard seeds, red pepper seeds, coconut flakes, coconut milk, oil, and curry leaves. My three-year-old niece sat at the dinner table singing “Dreidel, dreidel, dreidel” and calling for challah with butter in front of a batik of Ganesh as we tucked in, veg on one end of the table (cauliflower rice, matar paneer, dahl), meat on the other (curried chicken with cashews, that shrimp dish), for what everyone agrees was the best Christmas meal ever.

The syncretic Christmas has taken various forms in my family over the decades, from the most traditionally Christian — roast pork loin for the main and stollen, a traditional German Christmas cake representing Christ in swaddling cloth, for dessert , with German marzipan on mirror diorama-building activities for children — to the most Jewish-American — everyone ignoring the holiday and small groups getting together for Italian or Chinese food. In recent years, I’d waged my own lonely war on Christmas (which consisted entirely of asking the question, “Why are we celebrating Christmas?”), as the number of family members I had to shop for ballooned from six to nine to 11, and now 15 people, none of whom are Christian, and the expense and effort of celebrating a holiday none of us believe in began to seem increasingly ridiculous. I have to say, though, this latest version, which has jettisoned the Germanic-American dishes for Indian recipes new and old, works fantastically. I’ve even managed to negotiate side-agreements with some of the relatives (present truces, we call them), so that we don’t have to get each other things. That’s progress.

As in, fake blogs. Interesting New York Post story on the Pay-Per-Post blogger advertising strategy.

Mike Albo‘s awesome description of going home for the holidays:

Every year I arrive at my parents’ house in Springfield, Va., armed with my healthy self-edifying projects — big leafy Penguin classics, Chomsky-explains-it-all books and a backlog of fortifying magazines. And every year I think I am going to actually read a paragraph of one of these things. But then I walk in the front door, say ‘hi’ to my mom and dad, stand at the kitchen counter and start eating cheese.

Heh.

Balmy in Boston, too:

Retailers are calling it the Coat Crisis of 2006, a fashion fiasco measured in racks of unsold fur-lined shearlings at Saks Fifth Avenue and down puffer jackets at Bloomingdale’s.

Balmy temperatures on the East Coast, with average highs this holiday season 15 degrees warmer than last year, have been disastrous for sales of all kinds of cold-weather clothing, from cashmere caps to wool scarves.