(A California Christmas tree)
Well, Christmas out here in California is not quite the same as it is back in NYC. Rachel and I drove around last night looking for houses with Christmas lights up. There were a few but not many. We were both a little bit homesick for the New York winter, I guess. I wouldn't have thought that I would miss that season there, ever, but it's true. There is a stronger sense of Christmas there. I'm sure the weather has a lot to do with it. That, and the fact that every Christmas movie ever made was shot there and almost exclusively about the place.
Other than "A Christmas Story" of course. The best Christmas movie ever, says Z.
In the car I joked that one doesn't get the feeling that California played a very big part in the civil war, maybe that's it. It's almost as if there is only a north and a south on the east coast. The west coast is just west... upper-west and lower-west. I'm sure there are names for it, but it isn't real at all. It's all just west coast here. I hope that I'm being incredibly ignorant on this point.
It makes me happy so it's probably wrong.
I think I'm going to modify the Christian myth of the Garden of Eden a little bit. Tell my child that it was Santa who had the serpent and then tempted Eve, getting us all cast out of the North Pole because she bit from the Christmas Tree of Knowledge, pictured above. That the North Pole used to be a lush tropical paradise but Santa's willful and wanton ways caused the abominable polar bears to eat all of the people that refused to leave. Casting Christmas as being the origin of all sin, that's why fruit cake tastes so bad, etc.
Well, we'll see. Mom might not let that one fly. I'll be a lone reindeerless storyteller.
We have Christmas visitors driving in from the city so I better go, before Rachel catches me writing any more blasphemies here. She'll be a Christian in the next few months. I can feel it coming. She already prays for me. I can almost hear the blessed invectives under her breath.
Below I leave you with an image from last year in NYC, to give you an idea of what we're missing, and a place to pause and give the breath of nature its due.....
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