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Whenever I hear mention of Christmas Valley, Oregon, I imagine a magical land of candy-cane mountains and gumdrop skies. Is this where Santa goes skiing in the off-season? Failing that, is there at least a mall with good Black Friday deals? —Donner and Blitzen Party
This is an excellent question for the holiday season, Donner, not only because of its timely subject matter, but because it can be answered without having to get anybody on the phone during the week of Thanksgiving. (Watch this space the week after Christmas for my book report about snails!)
I won't keep you in suspense: Christmas Valley, an unincorporated settlement in Oregon's Lake County, is not a holiday-themed vista of lollipop houses and marzipan traffic embankments.
Like much of southeastern Oregon's high desert, Christmas Valley is dry, sparsely populated (750 to 1300, depending on whom you ask), fiercely hot in summer and bitterly cold in winter. If you were shooting a movie about how the terraforming of Mars wasn't going all that well, you could find some good locations in this area.
What does this hamlet have to do with Christmas? Actually, nothing! Christmas Valley takes its name from the nearby dry lake bed, Christmas Lake. And Christmas Lake is actually a corruption of Christman (or Christman's) Lake, after a 19th-century cattleman named Peter Chrisman, often spelled Christman, who was neither Santa Claus nor the baby Jesus.
Notwithstanding this misidentification, the grasping hand of crass capitalism couldn't resist the area's fanciful name.
In the 1960s, a California developer named M. Penn Phillips decided Christmas Valley real estate would be easy to market to retirees, young families and other rubes. He built an airport and a rudimentary water system, and platted out a bunch of housing lots along roads with names like Candy Lane and Snowflake Road.
The lots did indeed sell briskly at first, until the new owners began to discover the area was not the lush, temperate oasis described in the sales brochures, and lawsuits ensued. Eventually, the area reverted to its natural, arid state—albeit with some new, stupid street names—and here we are.