Christmas In La La Land

It may not be fashionable to admit, but I love Christmas in Los Angeles.

OK, I don’t love everything about it. I don’t love the barrage of ruthlessly cheery Christmas songs that resound through the air extolling the joy of snowstorms, nor am I alone in this. Mr. Los Angeles once expressed to a supermarket clerk precisely what he yearned to do to the walkers in the Winter Wonderland, and the poor woman – who had been exposed to the torture for eight hours a day since the moment the last cranberry sauce-smeared Thanksgiving dinner plate had hit the groaning dishwasher – all but fell at his feet, sobbing in gratitude. Something should be done for these unfortunate people.

I don’t love being given American-style Christmas cookies, because I don’t have an excessively sweet tooth myself and when I offer them to other people, they rub their stomachs ruefully and announce that at some mysteriously unspecified other point over the last few days they’ve eaten far too much sugar to be able to contemplate eating more. What do people really do with Christmas cookies, by the way? I’ve never once seen anyone actually … well … eating one, and yet they do disappear. Maybe one of Santa’s reindeer has a bingeing problem.

And talking of Santa, I particularly don’t love the beady-eyed keeper of lists, exploiter of elves, and decider of who does and who does not deserve a gift on Christmas Day that is the American Santa Claus – in England, we had plain old Father Christmas, who does his own heavy lifting, gives toys to the naughty as well as the nice, and wouldn’t know a list or a lump of coal if you thrust it under Rudolph’s nose. That’s my kind of jolly old elf.

But those quibbles aside, I love an LA Christmas. What do you love about it? you ask. Well, let’s make a different sort of list – one of nice and nicer, if you like.

First of all, there’s the weather. Now, despite what Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha might have been able to have his wife Queen Victoria believe (and history has it he was pretty darned persuasive if you know what I mean), drifts of snow and icicles hanging from the boughs are not, in fact, fundamental to the Christmas experience. The Christmas story, let us not forget, is the story of the birth of one Jesus Christ. Which, according to the records, took place some 2024 years ago, give or take historical accuracy, and not in Germany, or in England, or even – sorry, Bing and Frank and Danny and Rosemary and even Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy – in New England, but in the town of Bethlehem, just south of Jerusalem. Where the climate is, in fact, remarkably similar to that of Los Angeles.

And the Los Angeles winter weather is … well, it’s just lovely. There’s enough of a nip in the air to make you want to bring out your fluffy sweaters, fire up the hot chocolate and get hygge, but nothing approaching enough to make you feel anything as uncomfortable as actually cold. There are some trees that will flame golden and scarlet and then dramatically drop their leaves to winter up the city streets, but they’re in enough of a minority that you are never required to look at a bare branch unless you specifically choose to. There’s pure white light during the day and blazing copper sunsets in the evening, and yet you never, ever have to scrape ice from your windshield. It’s winter Hollywood-style – with fabulous lighting, and none of the harsh reality. Sign me up anytime.

I also love the way the city is decorated. Los Angeles Christmas decorations exhibit a lofty indifference to the Los Angeles winter that surrounds them, and I love them for it. I love the 8 foot tall inflatable snowman wobbling and waving among the exotic cactus display of our neighbor’s responsibly landscaped drought-tolerant front yard. I love the strings of dashing reindeer and giant snowflakes slung between the slender palm trees of Beverly Hills. My friend Vanessa was once denied an overdraft by a bank manager in Culver City wearing a cozy red Santa hat, and says it was among the more entertaining rejections she has ever encountered. All more than a little silly? Yes, and proudly so. If you’re looking for sensible decorations, maybe you should have gotten off the plane in Boston instead.

My favorite part of Christmas of all is Christmas dinner. I’ve been cooking Christmas dinner for most of my adult life: I realized when I first came to America that if I wanted people around me for my Christmas meal, I should offer to cook it for them, and when Mr. Los Angeles entered my life, he brought his own contingent of hungry friends to join the throng. The meal itself, somewhat like our marriage, is a haphazard mixture of the American and the English, the contributions of friends, and the just plain what we make up as we go along.

Sometimes I serve a turkey English-style, with roast potatoes and Brussels sprouts instead of mashed potatoes and green beans, sometimes I cook something else; this being California, there are more salad offerings than you can shake a bough of holly at; sometimes our friend Szilvia brings a delectable buttery cheesy paprika-y dip known both appropriately and adoringly as Hungarian Heart Attack; and Mr. Los Angeles insists on a Midwestern concoction of sour cream and dried onion soup mix which also does get eaten, proving conclusively that there really is no accounting for tastes.

In the early days I used to follow the main course with a traditional English-style Christmas pudding, dark as mahogany and heavy as Miss Havisham’s heart, which Americans would hail with delighted cries of “Figgy pudding!” and “Just like in Dickens!” and “God bless us, every one!” until I could not help but notice that quite soon after those same Americans had actually tasted the fabled sweetmeat, the merriment would die down, eyes would begin to shift nervously, and lumps of the leaden monstrosity be pushed, discreetly but firmly, to the side of the bowl to be covered up with napkins, or in extreme cases, force-fed to the California peace lily plant, which really does deserve better. These days we have good American pumpkin pie instead.

It must be confessed that things do tend to go wrong during our Christmas dinner. In fact, things so often go wrong in our house over Christmas that we sometimes suspect it’s the way our household appliances have agreed to festivate the season.

There was the year the dishwasher broke down on December 24th. There was the year a bathroom pipe burst on December 22nd, which the plumber was so delighted with himself for having (almost) repaired on December 23rd, that on December 24th he retreated into a week-long triumphal alcoholic bender (don’t ask), leaving us on Christmas Eve with 25 people coming to dinner the next day and, not so much no hot water, as no running water at all (really – don’t ask). There was the year we’d splashed out on the most exquisite shoulder of hand-raised, lovingly nurtured, cossetted, flattered, story-read, and lullabied to sleep pork, which we’d soaked for two days in a luxurious bath of every delicious spice known to man or pig, and meticulously brought to the perfectly tremulous room temperature to roast, only to discover on Christmas day in the morning that the oven had died.

Disasters? It turns out they don’t have to be. It turns out that after sitting for a couple of hours over a heavy meal in the living room, many people are happy to move a portion of the party into the kitchen for the dishwashing option. It turns out that, if you happen to have a heroic nephew with a heart of gold and the tool kit of a former Boy Scout’s dreams, he’ll show up for you even on Christmas Eve. It turns out that – although you just might not want to suggest it as a permanent Christmas tradition – people find it quite funny on occasion to be served decadent side dishes and splash-out wine with rock hard barbecued chicken from the only place on the Westside that’s desperate enough to deliver on Christmas Day.

I love Christmas dinner and look forward to it all the year round. In fact, there’s only one meal I look forward to more, which is the meal Mr. Los Angeles and I have to ourselves on the day after Christmas. The day when we have nothing to do but sprawl around the house or sit on the patio in the mild winter sun, reading a carefully chosen book (lookin’ at you this year, Al Pacino’s memoir), nursing our virtuous exhaustion with coffee and leftover pie which at some point will melt into a gin and tonic, and just maybe, or then again just maybe not, staying one hundred and one per cent awake until it’s time to fix the meal I dream about the entire year through: Christmas leftover sandwiches seasoned with a spicy side of gossip about what happened the day before.

Now, that’s the joy of Christmas.

Happy holidays everyone, however you celebrate them!