I know you don't drive at night either, Noddy. For me, the end of daylight savings takes away some of my personal savoir faire.
I also remember the Christmas season being connected to the start of Advent.
I've done Christmas in New York and Chicago and Los Angeles, and in the very north of California, where friends had bad auto crashes in rainstorms - one friend of a friend went off a cliff and crawled back up with a broken leg - I almost had one last year as I tried to get to New Mexico through some tough weather. Some years ago I remember getting to my in-laws in Hemet (dammit) just in the nick of time before washouts...
There are some joys to Christmas in California too, including the occasional walk at the beach on Christmas morning.
We stopped with the trees and put chili lights on a large Opuntia ficus indica cactus. Damned hard to drag in and out of the house...
Up in the north north coast, it sometimes froze, and depending on your exact neighborhood there could be snow, and certainly snow inland. Not snow like the -7 degrees of my childhood (we didn't have windchill around then).
Ah well, I agree that this is too soon.
When I went shopping in september for teacher-ish things they had already started stocking the xmas stuff.
My grandmother, who was born in 1896, used to tell me wonderful stories of the Christmastimes of her childhood. Happily for her, the family was quite wealthy in those days.
Bundling up to go for sleigh rides -- because that's how they actually got around in the winter. They would keep their feet warm with fireplace heated rocks under a rug in the sleigh. Sometimes, as a treat, they would get a baked yam to hold in their muff to keep their hands warm. The treat was that they got to eat it too.
Her grandparents were candy makers, so they always had sweet treats, too. And there was a whole array of Christmas specialties from the shop ~ starting in mid-December.
Carolling. Sometimes she did it, and sometimes she played hostess and doled out the wassail.
But my favourite thing was her story of the family Christmas tree. She and her four siblings would go to bed on Christmas Eve in a house full of yummy smells, but no decorations. Sometime after all the children were asleep, her father would go out and get the tree and then the adults of the family would decorate it. So ... when the kids woke up on Christmas morning, the tree in all its glory would be utterly magical to them.
And then everything disappeared on Twelvth Night.
So, in her day, although some things were prepared ahead, Christmas was basically a 2 week thing. I think that the only way to capture that magic again would be to shorten the season. Ain't gonna happen, I know.
