COMMENTARY ON CHRISTMAS : Miss Snow? <i> Glory </i> in Our Sacred Tradition of Ersatz Winter : To us, the white stuff is just something on which to ski, before heading down the mountain for a Yuletide beach party.

I could never decide whether it was touching or silly: people driving down the mountain from Big Bear with big clods of snow skewered on their car antennae. You don’t see it that much anymore, but it used to be a kind of a holiday season ritual. You took the family up the mountain to the snow, flopped around in it for a few hours, then took as much of it home with you as you could.

If you drove a car, it went on the antenna and lasted until you got to the Orange County line, provided it was a cold day (if it was warm, you couldn’t make it as far as Riverside). If you drove a pickup, though, you could shovel the stuff in by the ton, and by the time you got home you could celebrate the season by smearing your lawn with clammy slush.

Currier and Ives did not live here.

Still, there’s something about the holiday season that compels native Southern Californians--the people who regard an even, bronze tan as their birthright and howl with misery at the hint of the first brisk October breeze--to try with deadly earnestness to duplicate the wintertime holiday atmosphere of a place they may never even have visited. Until Jan. 1, they want Costa Mesa to look like Vermont.

Fair enough. I visited Vermont for the first time in August, to attend a friend’s wedding in Burlington, and I can assure you that Vermont is a worthy place. In August it is startlingly lush and green, the air is pure and sweet, Lake Champlain is clear and placid, the people are outgoing and cheerful and the food is good.

Tell that to the natives and they’ll thank you. They’ll also give each other little sidelong looks before bringing up the subject of winter. It’s the same look doctors give each other before they tell you you’ll never play the violin again.

Vermont in winter, they will tell you, is war. It is you against nature, and the deck is stacked. You must order everything in the L.L. Bean catalogue and wear it all at once, and even that isn’t enough.

If the Vermont roads are passable, they are either treacherously slick or filled with salt and abrasive frozen gravel. Starting your car in the morning is like performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation. And through it it all there is the unspoken but absolute rule that if you slip up and let the cold get to you, you could die.

But here, unless you get clobbered by a falling blimp on your front lawn, the simple act of strolling outdoors in jeans and an aloha shirt to screw in a new Christmas light won’t turn you into a stiff. It will in Vermont.

Holiday cheer doesn’t come easy. You can’t sing Christmas carols if you can’t move your lips.

Still, we in Orange County get rhapsodic about such things as snowflakes and icicles and hoarfrost. We watch “Dr. Zhivago” and see the sleigh rides with Julie Christie in furs and forget about Omar Sharif stumbling across the steppes with the wolves howling. Snow, to us, is something that drifts down dreamily, settles lightly and makes a squeaking sound beneath our new skis, as we make the last run of the day before driving back down the mountain to make that 7 p.m. beach party.

(Yes, it’s possible. I’ve done it. And I haven’t been a bit shy about telling East Coasters about it when they start the self-congratulatory hardy talk.)

This is not real winter. This is Hollywood winter. It’s the winter that gives Woody Allen so much ammunition. (Remember driving through Beverly Hills in “Annie Hall”?) It’s a winter in which no one’s face radiates painful crimson, snow comes in an aerosol can and the only ice is in the pina coladas.

But so what? Vermont gets a couple of postcard days and four months of the kind of cold that keeps Russia from being invaded. By the time the Angels are playing exhibition games in Palm Springs, Vermont will have been moving in frigid slow motion for more than 100 days--which makes it that much more difficult to dodge falling icicles--and everyone’s blood has turned to molasses. They stare out at the monochromatic landscape with haunted eyes and spend their nights reading Kafka and watching their cars decompose.

Meanwhile, we’re having brunch on the veranda at Las Brisas and talking about how much fun we had at the Rose Parade when we sat on the curb on Colorado Boulevard in L.L. Bean shorts and Ray-Bans, sipping cold Calistogas and feeling sorry for the Iowa band in those heavy wool uniforms. Then we put the top down and gun off to Baja for a few carnitas tacos and a couple of perfect margaritas on the sunny side of the pool at the Rosarito Beach Hotel.

So set up the sleigh on the dehydrated lawn. Spray that white guck on your windows. Put on gloves when a cold snap hits and the temperature plummets to 58. Work up a couple of shivers, just for fun. Have a slice of pineapple and pass the Coppertone. Carry on the sacred tradition of ersatz winter.

And if you’ve got friends in Vermont, call them and tell them what a bitter December we’re having out here in what used to be a desert. If you’re quick, you can hang up before their frozen lips can form a proper reply.