Wow, this year has flown by, and for all of us living on Peacock Lane that means it’s already time to turn on our holiday lights. Again. From December 15th to New Year’s Eve, for 85 years now, our street celebrates Christmas like few other places on Earth. Each evening for the next couple of weeks, thousands of Portlanders will walk the four blocks that make up our lane, looking at the lights, drinking hot chocolate from our “free or donations booth that holds about two ‘laners’ and a few hundred gallons of hot chocolate.” Visitors to the lane are sometimes singing, sometimes playing bagpipes, sometimes riding in the clydesdale drawn cart. Sometimes juggling, sometimes on unicycles, and sometimes juggling on unicycles and playing bagpipes. Sometimes they’re with the parade of old English sheep dogs. Sometimes the old Volkswagon beetles are rolling through. And always we have bagpipes. Peacock Lane is an amusement park for the rest of this year and I love it. Even the bagpipes.
Originally our street was SE 40th street, but that was way back in the 20s…the nine-teen 20s…and in 1927, to be exact, the street’s name was officially changed to Peacock Lane. According to an old newspaper article, it was one of Portland’s society ladies who said when our street was lit up this time of year it “looked like a peacock”. From that comment a formal petition was…petitioned… by local residents and the little lane that goes from Stark to Belmont has been known as Peacock Lane ever since.
So from Peacock Lane to all of you, let me be one of the first to wish you Merry Christmas. And here comes the bagpipes…
