different Christmases

Still reading: The Sparrow

So it's almost Christmas time. Or Kwanzaa. Or Festivus, or Hannukah. Hoorah. The last time I felt this lack of festivity for the holidays was when I lived in Los Angeles, and the weather was seventy degrees, and I could still go to the beach in December and play volleyball, and nobody got crazy decorating their house so it looked like a garish nightmare. Christmas in LA is palm trees, smog, and a guy wearing shorts and a Santa hat waving at you to use his particular car wash.

Christmas in Cincinnati is lots of snow and candy cane fences and the festival of lights at the zoo across my old house. It was midnight mass and dangerously iced over streets and ham and lumpia shanghai at my mom's and coffee with my friends at Sitwell's, back when it was in a basement and not in a diner.

Christmas in Vienna was meat fondue and cheese and wine. It was O Tannenbaum and Stille Nacht and the Vienna Boys Choir in the Stefansdom. It was shoes left out for gifts, not stockings, and the Turkish kids playing out on the street and buying kebabs at 4a.m.
The Christmas of my childhood in Manila was lots of food and midnight processions on the street and wearing dresses. It was strings of sampaguita flowers, wearing them or putting them on statues of saints or bringing them to church as a prayer garland. It was firecrackers and beggars in the street and a huge lechon being roasted over a pit.

What's the holidays like for you?