Holidays in City of Brotherly Love Are Different Story

Each year I pass a dozen hectic days in Philadelphia, watching the end of December drunkenly bump into New Year’s Eve. I heap friends and relatives on my plate and then I can’t consume them all. I fly back to San Diego, still raging against the wimpy city that postpones its New Year’s Day parade because of the threat of rain. As I’m crushed against the airport luggage-go-round, I invariably ask myself why.

Why do I spend precious vacation time on the same ugly treeless street I grew up on? It’s not my family, who have expressed their desire (on numerous occasions) to relocate the holiday to my house in Coronado. It’s not the warm memories I have of “The Sinatra Christmas Album” blaring out of our neighbor’s porch loudspeaker, which some vandals thankfully destroyed last year. No, I don’t go to Philadelphia out of sentiment. I go to Philadelphia out of fear.

It’s the fear that Christmas Present will find me sipping champagne in California and rattle me like a limp bicycle chain. It’s less than a phobia but more than the threat of discontent.

I experienced it the one time I tried to burn the yule log with a friend’s family, an exceedingly gracious clan with a well-appointed house in Palo Alto. How could they have known that the “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” record, played at the wrong moment, would send a grown woman into her room to cry for her mother?

Call it an infirmity of the familiar. Christmas is a potent holiday that calls for undiluted emotions, prepared East Coast style. You can’t get these in San Diego. People are friendly all the year through, so it’s no big deal when strangers smile at you.

Maybe I can explain the differences better by telling the holiday story of Al, Leon and Linda.

Al, Leon and Linda are living, breathing exclamation points to my conclusions. I met them last year, a few nights before Christmas, while attending a small party in a southwest Philadelphia home.

In the beginning of the evening I learned that Leon ran a barbecue restaurant that served for years as a police hangout, Al had a desk job at the police department and liked to drink bourbon, and Linda was Leon’s mistress. (All their names have been changed because Leon’s wife would barbecue him if she found out about Linda.)

By the end of the night I learned that business at Leon’s barbecue pit was sinking, Al landed at his desk job because he drank too much bourbon and Linda was not Leon’s only mistress.

What was so distinguishing about Leon, Linda and Al? They wrestled with the same demons and disappointments as people in San Diego. But they did it with a certain verve, a willingness to enter into friendship or enmity without thinking about the consequences. The big difference lay, I suppose, in their expectations of life and the people it handed them. I was a stranger, a woman with irrelevant credentials. They were who they were. None of us was aware of anyone’s implications.

It was the same attitude I met at the Italian market on 9th Street, ingrained in a vendor who bellowed at me for getting fresh with one of his tomatoes: Philadelphians size up situations and people immediately, anticipating the worst. Then, with luck, they quickly find a common ground and build up from there.

Especially during the holidays. I argued with that man, my face flushed from the incivility of raised voices, as he tried to unload his injured produce on me. I had forgotten the unspoken rule at some stands: only the vendor touches the fruit. But when the tomato transaction was over (I got one beautiful enough to varnish and another that belonged on last month’s sandwich), we both tasted victory, along with some respect for our opponent.

Life is a crunchy, sometimes odious meal: He or she with the best tomato eats the best salad. Before parting, the vendor and I became snug as peas because I mentioned, casually but quite deliberately, that I grew up in South Philly but had moved to San Diego. (Living in California is on par with owning a piece of the True Cross in some Philadelphia households.)

This was enough to win me a stop-by invitation on Christmas Eve. The vendor’s wife would welcome me, I knew, with an open refrigerator. But to add a few more chestnuts to the fire, the man’s nephew lived in Santa Rosa. Santa Rosa is more than 500 miles from my house, but who’s looking at a map? I could do no wrong. He almost took back the sofa-soft tomato.

Had I been on 9th Street in Coronado, the nearest tomato would have been listening to Muzak at Safeway. This tomato, never having heard a huckster’s voice exaggerating its merits, would remain pale and listless. This tomato would end its life sliced into garnish.

I would pass this sad tomato over, wishing I could tell the produce manager how much I miss New Jersey tomatoes. But I wouldn’t think of voicing my complaints for fear of his benevolent smile, his patient explanation of why he can’t get New Jersey tomatoes, his fatuous promise that he would consider importing them. He would not tell me where I could stick my produce preference.

But back to Al, Leon and Linda. The night began with Al saying, four times in a row: “All people are the same.” This was in response to an off-handed comment by Linda, who was patient and polite early in the evening. But Al had a habit of interrupting conversations with a totally disconnected observation. He would repeat himself until his statement was either acknowledged or worked into the topic.

At a San Diego gathering, people would have either tolerated Al ad nauseam or left the party. He was, after all, just expressing himself. If someone did decide to confront him about his behavior, Al would have gotten lost in the up-front jargon. But he understood Linda when she said, toward the end of the evening: “Shut your mouth.” It worked long enough for Linda to tell us about Leon’s infidelities to both her and his wife.

The most recent one, which Linda chanced upon in a supermarket parking lot, ended when she took the appropriate measures with a wooden plank she found next to Leon’s car. (Leon denied everything, and Al backed him up with “It happens in the best of families” repeated five times.) Everyone laughed when she told the story, including Leon.

This conversation would have never happened on the West Coast. Couples are discreet; what goes on behind their Levolors is privy to them and their counselors. If they do take their relationship public, it goes something like this:

“Renalta and I are trying to process through our barriers to intimacy.”

Or: “Marc and I have decided to have an open marriage. He’s a little more comfortable with the concept of dating than I am, but I think we’ll be able to work around my insecurities. Would you pass the Chardonnay?”

A tipsy Al and a stalwart bourbon on the rocks are closer to my idea of a party.

Leon spent last Christmas with his wife, an unalterable arrangement that Linda mentioned with her only display of submission that evening. It was obvious to me that Leon will be with his wife for many Christmases to come, judging from the tone in his voice when he told me how well she cares for their tropical fish.

And I will be with my family (at their house, I hope), for another generation of Christmas dinners. And it’s not just because of the egg nog my mom always makes. Much as I like it, she never puts enough nutmeg in. But at least I can complain about it.