Everything but a
White Christmas
By Terence Loose
or me, the idea of a
white Christmas, with snowball fights, sleigh rides and scarves, has always
been as mythical and illusive as the big bearded man in red with an affinity for
chimneys and chocolate chip cookies. I grew up on Balboa Island, in sunny Southern California. Our house was on Grand Canal, which rarely
freezes over. Most of my childhood Christmases were spent there, running the
air-conditioner on 62 so we could fire up the yuletide log, and opening
presents in front of a wall of glass while tourists in shorts looked on,
munching on Balboa Bars and pointing as if we were the animated window display
at Macy’s.
And though my father
was from Michigan and my mother hailed
from Massachusetts, both wonderfully
white in December, we had no extended family to visit. There was talk of a
clergyman uncle who would only preach in a round church, so the devil couldn’t
corner him, and a cousin who sent me socialist propaganda for presents when I
was 10 and liked to picnic in graveyards. I was told to steer clear of both of
them.
The rest of the
family stayed quiet – or, based on the former two references, perhaps they were
merely forbidden visitors. I don’t know. But for me, the tourists on the other
side of the glass became the extended family. And like any good one, I always
had to clean up after them when they left.
Also, my family
preferred tennis and golf to skiing, and tennis balls rarely take a true hop on
the snow. So when we were tired of the menagerie that was home, we fled to Palm Desert, where we had a
condo, and had a sand-brown, Palm tree-green holiday. We spent Christmas
watching frustrated men in appalling clothes beat the crap out of unsuspecting
little white balls. One year, my sister and I, undoubtedly driven mad by the
romantic white Christmas images accosting us at the air-conditioned desert
mall, decided to have a snowball fight with the errant golf balls on our patio.
After taking a few Titlists to the forehead, though, we called a truce and hit
the pool to work on our tans.
Another year, on the
way to the desert in our family stretch van, we made a late night stop for gas.
Without telling anyone, my mother, who was sleeping in the back, got out to go
to the ladies room. An hour later we arrived at our condo and discovered her
gone. At midnight, like some
beer-loving Santa in a 4x4 sleigh – with a ski boat hitched to its rear – a man
with a big belt buckle and bigger cowboy hat delivered the present of our mom.
She had thumbed a ride with a caravan heading for Lake Powell and the only white
around was my father’s face, full of fear.
Still, the closest I
ever came to a white Christmas came in the desert, when we took the tram into
the local mountains. There was snow on the ground, in patches, every once in a
while, and it was more brown than white. But if we went off the path and
climbed a few rocks, and shook a few trees, we could gather enough to build a
foot-tall snowman.
As I got older my
Christmases only got further from white.
I spent one
Christmas in summer, in Australia. It was a year
after college and I was traveling with a buddy. We celebrated Christmas in a
campsite, broke and sweating through 106 degree heat and 80% humidity, swatting
at mosquitoes and 10,000 miles away from our families (actually, that was the
only good part). Instead of reindeer and sleigh bells, we had kangaroos and
kookaburra calls and our mutual present to one another was a cheap box of wine
(yes, cheap and box are redundant when talking of wine).
I spent another
Christmas on a boat in a tiny Mexican bay named Chamala. It was only 85 degrees
and there were no mosquitoes, but the only white came from an overly
enthusiastic beach bar owner who had spray-painted a few palm trees and covered
part of the sand in white plastic bags.
It was around 10
p.m. when our close friends on another boat radioed for help. One
of the plastic bags had wrapped around their dinghy’s outboard propeller as
they were trying to punch through the surf and caused their capsizing, which
had in turn caused a four-inch gash across my friend Jim’s elbow. The rest of
the festive holiday was spent in a “doctor’s” living room while he stitched up
Jim, who used tequila for anesthetic. The good news was the doctor considered
the stitches as his gift to Jim.
So you might say that Christmas should
be my least favorite holiday, and in fact, my wife tends to start calling me
Scrooge around December 1st. But deep down, I like the idea of Christmas, a
real Christmas, without joggers or sunscreen or sandtraps; with snowmen and
sleds and frosting on trees that doesn’t come from a can. I’ve seen it in
movies and on TV and on those annoyingly perfect picture cards our east coast
friends send us every year. So I know it must exist; it must be only a plane
ride away.
Or maybe, just
maybe, I can get that jolly old guy with the magic reindeer and the beard as
white as fake snow to take me there some day. ‹
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