Christmas Present

For any of us longtime West Coasters, specifically Southern California West Coasters, Christmas is and always has been a challenge. After all, we have none of the requisite seasonal accouterments for the holiday, particularly cold and snow, the climatic prompt for all the iconic Christmas paraphernalia. Sleds and mittens and pine boughs and chestnuts roasting on an open fire. Yet, we continue to play along with the Currier & Ives conceit, sending out Christmas cards with sleighs on them, flocking our Christmas trees and raising our voices to join in with “White Christmas” or “Let It Snow,” songs, by the way, written right here in good, old, sunny Southern California.

I sang them. I still sing them. We all do. But do we really want it--the cold and all that goes with it? Or are we just in the grip of some leftover Dickensian version of Christmas, a version that has little authentic resonance for most of us, save some expats from colder climes? Don’t we feel a trifle corny out here on the reputed cutting edge still paying obeisance to such nostalgic old-world imagery?

It’s not just that it’s retro. There’s something else. Not to be too metaphorical, but the longing for a winter-white Christmas has--or had--in it a tacit nostalgia for a winter-white world, a Saturday Evening Post cover of ruddy-faced white folks gathered in multigenerational family tribes (tribes, I might add, where women did the cooking and cleaning and men the carving).

Isn’t it time to admit what we all know: All those preconceived notions of Christmas are passe, from the weather to the family structure? After all, last year it was so warm we opened our presents in the backyard, with the sun beating down. Then we went for a hike with the dogs in the coastal hills and returned to sip chardonnay--not eggnog or wassail--by the fire. Yes, that we couldn’t give up, but we had to keep the windows open because otherwise it was too hot.

In short, the nostalgic grip of those white Christmases is over, or certainly on the way out. Probably global warming has a hand in this. But there’s also been a flood of newcomers to Southern California with their memories and traditions--many from warm places to the south--and they’ve brought their own holiday habits and festivities and foods. It’s not uncommon for people here to serve tamales or enchiladas for Christmas dinner or a turkey swabbed in adobo sauce or marinated in a Caribbean brew of lemon, lime and garlic. The signature American Christmas dish--Norman Rockwell’s steaming turkey-- has been updated and, if you ask me, made more zesty and far more ecumenical.

That’s the bigger issue with all this. With our new multicultural Christmas meals--dim sum is favored by more than a few--we are being force-fed tolerance. They’re a reminder of the new world, not the old one. As we stop dreaming of a white Christmas, we inevitably become more embracing of the multihued world we live in. The real world. We stop looking over our continental shoulder at the mythic Christmases of the Old America and celebrate the actual ones of the New America.

In this New America are new families, not the old vertical ones--kids, parents, grandparents--but horizontal ones, where people are linked by choice and circumstance as much as by blood. The traditional nuclear family--a married couple with children--made up only 26% of American households in 1998, down from 45% in 1972. The most common living arrangement in the United States consists of unmarried people and no children.

So as we look around our Christmas tables and Christmas parties--certainly, here in Southern California, but, increasingly, everywhere else in the country--we see these new families: couples, gay and straight; single moms with adopted kids; stepfamilies with every permutation of bloodlines and love lines.

My own consists of my husband, four grown stepsons, their wives, their children--I now have seven step-grandchildren--my mother, sister, brother-in-law, niece, my brother-in-law’s two grown children by his previous marriage, my stepmother, my stepsister, my half-brother. The exploded nuclear family, circa 2000, breaking Christmas bread together or, in our case, short ribs, mashed potatoes and collard greens (or bitter broccoli--this is a subject of family discussion) as the winter sun sinks into the Pacific.

What could be better, sweeter, more messy--and more hopeful? Not to mention warmer.

I do not, for one minute, think these new families are perfect. Hardly. They are what they are: families who have fractured along various fault lines and reconfigured themselves, as we who live here build and rebuild along the fault lines that lie under our feet.

Nor is our homeland perfect, struggling always with its polyglot population. But we are the face of the present and of the future. It’s probably a good time to surrender, once and for all, any vestigial snow-kissed visions of Christmases past and celebrate, instead, what we have become.