Days of Mistletoe and Sun Block

It is a measure of how long I have been here, I suppose, and how well I have adapted to this city of perpetual summer.

I can walk out my back door on Christmas night and gaze at the multicolored twinkle of lights as they reflect off the surface of my swimming pool and not feel awed, or even amused, by the sight.

I can, without a trace of irony, offer my children this choice on a Christmas day when the mercury hovers around 80 degrees: Would you rather go swimming . . . or ice skating?

And for the first time in my 20 years in Southern California, I think about my family back in Ohio--huddled around the fireplace or bundled up against the biting cold--and I no longer wish I were back home; I no longer envy their white Christmas or miss the chill of winter in the air.

I realize with a start--as I head out of the house on Christmas weekend, clad in nothing more than a T-shirt and jeans--that I can do without the snow.

*

My heart still aches when I think back on my first Christmas here, when the warm weather seemed to mock all my memories of the holiday.

My husband and I had come from Ohio a few months before. We had few friends and no family here, but we were too broke to return home for a holiday visit. So we decorated a tiny tree and spent Christmas afternoon engaged in an act so odd, so unfamiliar, I couldn’t have imagined it in my wildest childhood Christmas dreams: We sat nursing margaritas, floating around in an outdoor pool.

Maybe it was the effect of the magaritas or the heat from the sun. Or maybe just the strains of “Jack Frost nipping at my nose . . . “ floating out of an apartment window on a day when the temperature crested at 82 degrees.

But suddenly I was sobbing, miserable at what my Christmas Day had become, unable to reconcile the holiday I had always known with this day in this veritable paradise.

It was more than missing my family, although I missed them mightily. More than nostalgia and homesickness, which can ambush a transplant on any holiday.

It was the sense of disorientation, of being disconnected from everything that signified Christmas for me . . . hot cocoa in front of a roaring fire, snowball fights, warm hands on cold cheeks. And real icicles--not scraggly strings of twinkly white lights--dangling from the eaves.

There was something so unsettling about the notion of chestnuts roasting on an open fire in a place where there were oranges in bloom on the tree outside my door and people swimming laps and playing tennis outdoors on a day made for cold and snow.

*

I knew it would get easier, and over the years, it did.

I learned I could get used to Christmas shopping in shorts; that if I opened the doors to the patio, we could enjoy the fireplace without making the house too hot; that I could postpone cookie-baking until late at night, when the heat of the day began to fade.

Still, I found it hard sometimes to conjure up the joys of the white Christmases I cherished in the midst of so much unnatural warmth.

I suspect other newcomers feel that way too.

My friend Rose is in her first Christmas season here. A refugee from Connecticut, she expected to love the holidays here, after too many frigid New England winters, housebound with three sons during the long Christmas break.

This year, her boys spent the week before Christmas at soccer camp, frolicking in shorts on the lush, green grass of a local park.

“It’s like summer camp . . . in December,” she kept repeating, marveling at the prospect of jaunts to the zoo, the park, even the beach, that she has planned for this post-Christmas week.

But her children have not been so easily wooed. Yes, it was fun to ride their new bikes on Christmas morning. But the days have now settled into monotony, all blue and bright, absent the possibility of snow forts, sled rides, snowball fights . . . all that a kid’s white Christmas means.

And by now, they have begun to grumble, to realize that for all they’ve gained, there is much they must give up, traditions they will have to put away.

It just doesn’t feel like our Christmas, her oldest son keeps saying.

It’s not, she realizes. Not yet. And it may not be, for years to come.

But down the road, the Christmas will arrive when she’ll realize that two strains of tradition have merged into one.

And it will seem perfectly normal--as it did for us this Christmas--to bundle up and meet Jack Frost indoors, at the local ice skating rink, and emerge pink-cheeked and chilly into air warmed by a blinding sun.