Christmas

West Adams Holiday Walking Tour

Spy vintage homes done up for the season.

If you're into festooning your place with jack-o'-lanterns and orange lights in October, or corn and pumpkins come November, or bows and holly during the final month of the year, you likely hold a host of opinions about what constitutes "a Halloween house" or "a Thanksgiving house" or the kind of abode that looks like it'll hold a spray of seasonal decor well.

Pretty much all of the houses around the West Adams area can qualify as a name-the-holiday house, thanks to their stately historic characters, their deep porches or front entries, or the fact that they just look like the homes seen on the front of Christmas mystery novels, the kind so often set in New England.

You can enter that novel, for a few hours, via a walking tour organized by the West Adams Heritage Association. Happening on Sunday, Dec. 6, the tour'll spotlight Haledale Avenue, hence the 2015 theme "Haledale Holidays."

The "Holidays" end of that means you'll see a lot of merriment when peeking inside the houses. Trees and lights and bows'll lend the public spaces of the homes cheer, and visitors'll stroll away with a sense of how December might have looked around the centrally located neighborhood a century ago.

If you've heard of the West Adams progressive dinners that happen around now, this is similar, less the eating part. You'll get to soak in the sights, and glorious, old-school architecture, for thirty bucks.

"This gem of a neighborhood has been hiding in plain sight," says the association. Each home and tract has a story, and several share the same architect. Beyond admiring the festoonery, you'll learn a casa's typically many-layered story, a story that never begins and ends with merely the year it was built. Some of our city's earliest builders, and characters, had a hand in the early rise of West Adams.

The progressive dinners have been around for almost 30 years, making this to-do a venerable one (though not as venerable as the houses highlighted). Want to stroll? It's on from noon to 3 p.m. on Sunday, Dec. 6.

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