Sunday Hania and I drove down to the Design District where, walking around, I was struck by something odd: no holiday decorations. They were as absent from the public spaces as they were from the commercial venues. I wondered if the district had unanimously voted on a deck-the-halls ban this year. We could have been back in Communist Poland - lines even stretched out of some of the stores - a Soviet Bloc country that had miraculously been gifted with balmy weather and luxury shops.
