Growing up in Phoenix, my Michigander cousins would often pity us for never getting to enjoy a white Christmas. Usually I’d let it go, sorta like when they’d ask if we had to shake the snakes and scorpions out of our boots before we hiked to school. Eventually, I had had enough and sat them down with a globe for a history lesson.
"Look," I’d say, "here’s Bethlehem, see? Follow this line of latitude around and what do you notice about Phoenix?"
"Hmmm," they’d inevitably reply.
"Yeah, well, see, same latitude, similar weather patterns, so BACK OFF," I’d boast. I didn’t bother going into how at Lutheran elementary school we’d learned that Bible scholars suspect that Christ may have actually been born in April anyway.
I’ll admit though, that living in the subtropics doesn’t present an environment in line with the quintessential American ideal of a holiday season. This occurred to me just the other day at school. I set up a cardboard fireplace and hung stockings for Cheerleaders and Yearbook staffers. A student asked me "what’s the fireplace for," before I could explain about the stockings another kid answered, "for Santa, DUH!"
"But he comes down the chimney, there’s no chimney here."
I tried for years in vain to get my parents to move to a house with a fireplace for that very reason. But you don’t NEED a fireplace in Phoenix. It’s a desert. Perhaps to humor me, my parents would put up a decorative cardboard fireplace from Sears.
"But we don’t have a chimney," I’d protest.
"Well, uh, um, that’s Okay, Santa will come down our air conditioning vent ducts." Apparently that satisfied me. I mean, really, think about it, if a 300 pound, 500 year old man in a red velvet suit can circumnavigate the earth in one night with flying reindeer and fit down a chimney flue- he can fit through our AC unit and pop out our cardboard fireplace. It’s "Christmas Magic."
Iowegians may enjoy cookies, cocoa and casseroles, but one of my favorite memories were the tamales dad brought home at Christmas from a Mexican deli near the airport where he worked. It may have only been one or two years, but my memory elevated it to the stature of tradition.
A really neat Christmas tradition we had was going to the Sisters’. The Evangelical Sisterhood of Mary was a cloister of Lutheran nuns. That’s right, all you Catholics (and Lutherans) who just did a double take. The story was that a Sunday school class of girls were in the only building not destroyed when the allies bombed Darmstadt Germany. They pledged their life to the Lord. Their leader, Mother Basilea Schlink could drop names like Deitrich Bonhoeffer and Corrie ten Boom.
Their compound, Kanaan in the desert was in the shadows of Mummy Mountain. Ironically, just miles away from a POW camp for NAZI sailors during WWII. Some of them had escaped with a map and a raft, headed for the Salt River, little did they know that the Salt is a dry wash bed 11 ½ months out of year.
At any rate, these Lutheran nuns in the middle of the desert, like that Sidney Potier movie "Lilies of the Field," had the greatest Christmas cookies and tea, and elaborate German decorations around a Nativity scene where everyone would sing and listen to the Christmas message. All us tiny kids got to ring bells and tambourines. Instead of a tree, they used juniper branches. It smelled great.
Don’t believe in Lutheran nuns? Check out their website at www.kanaan.org
You can’t imagine all the poinsettias in Phoenix. At the art museum there was always a display of trees, the best ones were made of potted poinsettias. Of course it just wasn’t Christmas without a few wreaths made of chili peppers.
No, we didn’t have snowmen, but lots of people liked to decorate their Saguaro cacti with Santa costumes or spray tumbleweeds with flocking and stack them on top of each other to make "Frosty the tumble-weed man."
Luminaries and the celebration of ‘La Posada’ (Mary and Joseph trying to find a room at the Inn, the Posada) is a powerful image of Christmas for me. So are little Indian children and angels by southwestern artist Ted Degrazia. Arizona Highways always had the most beautiful pictures of Spanish missions or the Grand Canyon dusted with a little snow, you can probably see some at www.arizhwys.com.
I admit it, when it’s 3° out and I have to shovel snow I sometimes miss the bougainvilleas and balmy breezes, but now I get to cuddle under flannel sheets and sip hot cocoa. And just the other day, as we were driving through the countryside, my daughter gets to spy a heard of does in the corn stubble and announce to us that she sees "Reindeer!"
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