Christmas in the desert
On Monday, the calendar read December 21, but it just didn’t feel like Christmas week to me. The season has gone fast. Not a lot of holiday parties or activities this year. And, we never put up a tree because we knew we were leaving town.
Yesterday, we flew out of the Burgh and into rainy Scottsdale for Christmas with my family. As you can see, Christmas has a much different vibe in Arizona. Not worse or better… just different.
For one thing, a lot of the decorations look much tackier here in 60 degree daylight and desert sand. If you’ve never been to the Phoenix area, it is a land of mini-malls and sub-division houses on cul-de-sacs. Not much here dates before the 1960s or the invention of air conditioning. Most of the homes have fake adobe fronts on them to give them that Southwestern flair. Suffice to say, it’s just not the Norman Rockwell, traditional, warm and fuzzy Christmas. Plus, yesterday was mostly wind, thunder, and rain.
Tonight, though, sitting on the patio with a nice cabernet and looking out into the pristine, open-desert Indian reservation behind my folks’ house, I smell the aroma of burning mesquite wood in someone’s fireplace, take in some of the neighborhood luminaria, and hear some distant coyotes howl. All of a sudden, the lights and the cactus shadows somehow come together. After all, I figure, the first Christmas was in a desert climate, not the snowy Poconos.
Okay, it now feels like Christmas week. Not a Burgh Christmas, to be sure, but a Sonoran Desert Christmas.
I was in Tucson, Arizona once, though not during Christmas. I long to go back one day. The purple (really, purple) mountains in the morning and evening were breath-taking. And the people were warm and gracious. Some were aging hippies who would happily tell you the best places to visit and tales of their lives in Tucson. I met Native Americans who had such beautiful faces, weathered by years in the dessert sun, who treated me like a dear friend though I had only just met them. I hope you enjoy your holidays in Arizona. We cling to our beloved Pittsburgh, but there are other places which can call to us as well.
Your tacky holiday decorations seem like just the tonic, after the weekend we’ve had back here in the east.
Sadly, the only time I’ve ever been to Arizona was visiting Tempe during August, when they really should just blockade off the city and declare it unfit for human habitation.