- Rain is forecasted to keep pouring down today and well into early next week. A frontal boundary from this current storm is pushing across the region on Christmas Day, which has given us periods of heavy rain and the potential for hail (and even snow) in some parts of the Bay Area; thunderstorms were recorded earlier this morning in Sonoma County as strong winds and rains descended on wine country. [SFGate/NWS]
- If you're really at your wits' end about what to do today, you can watch this burning digital yule log. [ABC7]
- ICYMI: Some Bay Area holiday pop-up bars will be open later today to serve you a Christmas-themed libation after all the gift unwrapping is finished. [Hoodline]
- RIP, Rivoli (though here's hoping that, unlike one freelance writer, you weren’t given a gift card to the once-beloved East Bay eatery literally a day before they closed). [Berkeleyside]
- Did you know there's an annual Latke Ball held on Christmas Eve in San Francisco? [Mission Local]
- Be extra grateful for those Christmas gifts this year; many of them might've cost, on average, 17% more than they did before the pandemic. [The Balance]
- In what's far from a Christmas Day miracle: Long-standing drought conditions in Madagascar's Ankarafantsika National Park have spurred "unprecedented" wildfires — blazes that now threaten the existence of some of the most endangered lemurs known to science. [Mongabay]
- And the vast majority of us can probably agree that the 15% of unvaccinated adults in this country deserve nothing but a lump of coal in their 2021 Christmas stockings. [New York Times]
Photo: Getty Images/Vitalii Petrushenko
