Usually, we've left LA for New Mexico by now, but we're waiting for Moth to be seen by her cat dentist again in order to be given (we hope) a travel All Clear. This means that in other years, we've always missed the local Holiday Block Party on Griffith Park Boulevard (which largely seems to be full of many bouncy castles, and a small tent of people playing jazz, and - well, we were there a bit too late for Santa, or the food and drink, but clearly it's mostly for the under 10s and their parents). I would love to take that top picture and blow it up - what looks at first glance like a naked man is actually a woman with a handbag and small child looking for all the world like it's 1963. Then at the bottom - how to re-purpose your small dinghy as a Christmas tree, with a palm tree in the background ...
My first sense that Californian - even American - Christmases were somewhat different from the UK came in around 1963, I should think, with the arrival of a Christmas card from an old Birmingham University friend of my father's, John Lerry - who for some reason moved to the US in 1952, and then in 1960 took up a job as Manager of Construction and Engineering at Stanford (I do not have a phenomenal memory ... his obituary was easy to find online, and it's a marker of the weirdness, to me, of his Christmas card that I remember his name). On it were his three preternaturally blond children sitting round a Christmas tree, with unwrapped presents - presumably it had been taken the previous year, and banked for this very purpose. Back then, in the early 60s in England, one simply did not, ever, put a family photo on a Christmas card - this seemed like a quintessentially strange American thing to do. Little did I think that sixty or so years later I'd be strolling down a street a few blocks away (little did I yet know the term "blocks," of course) and looking at scenes as foreign as these, in a temperature that was still hovering around 70.
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