Christmas in Palm Springs, and my relationship with ‘the holidays’

{all pictures my own, taken on this trip}

Christmas in Palm Springs was exactly what I’d always thought it would be, and imagined it to be based on years of movies and pop culture. There’s something I’ve always been drawn to about the 1950′s – 1970′s. ‘The 80s are where it gets bad, and then I like the ’90′s again exclusively for the music and fashion. But in terms of design, and our country, and every single thing about it– the politics and history, the architecture, the culture, the gender roles, the men, the women, their clothing, the music, the way things looked, the way things were, the glamor, the movie stars, their linen pants– I have always been OBSESSED with mid-century straight through the ’70′s. Retro retro retro. Every single thing about Mad Men’s last season. The F.U.R.N.I.T.U.R.E. The Motels. The hair styles. 1950-1979 are my favorite years in America. And I knew Palm Springs would be one big giant visual and cultural orgasm for me. It reminded me VERY much of what going to Cuba would be like too (I’ve seen my dad’s pictures and videos). Just a place totally stuck in time. The old cars. The SIGNAGE ON THE MOTELS. OH GOD, THE SIGNAGE. Every other structure was an old motel or restaurant with signage that made me feel like I had traveled back to 1956, or 1964. Like I was in the musical South Pacific. It was all so cool. Rich old people. A thriving, massive, gay culture. Historic hollywood neighborhoods where the biggest stars in the world used to come– Sinatra and Cary Grant and Janet Leigh. Ugh it was SO. COOL. !!!!!!!!

My boyfriend’s parents treated us to a week-long vacation in Palm Springs, which was incredible and generous and beyond anything I’d ever done. My family never took vacations, let alone over the holidays. And my family has never had a tradition for the holidays, for two reasons: lack of money, and my parents are divorced and never got re-married (and still live together in the same house where I spent my Christmases up to college, which happens to be a 10-minute drive from where Alex and I currently live in DC). So there was never like…. a “thing” that we did (except when we were children, of course).

Since I grew up (which I place as starting the summer of 8th grade and climbing upwards ever since) and my brother and I got more and more independent, our reality is that we’re less like a family than 4 individual people doing our own thing who have different relationships with each other. So whenever “the holidays” come, it’s just simply never been that different for me than what the rest of life is like. We don’t have any annual, regular, traditions or things that we do. We don’t have a predictable event that’s guaranteed to happen every Christmas Eve– like having the same people over, or opening stockings, or drinks by  the fire, or some  home-cooked meal. We don’t have cousins who live in the area to do some extended secret santa exchange with. So, I don’t view the holidays in anticipation of my mom’s pot roast or my dad’s hot toddies. I don’t view them in anticipation of me and my brother getting matching Christmas pajamas and taking silly pictures together. I don’t view them in anticipation of our tradition to eat cinnamon rolls for breakfast and unwrap our presents. None of that exists for me, so the holidays to me represent the summation of my OWN associations with snow and songs and friends and secret santa exchanges and the feeling I get when I smell the crispness of the air outside and remember how excited I used to get when the Santa Claus in the giant firetruck would come through our neighborhood. I’d describe it is as my holiday memories and anticipation not being family associated, but personal associated. My memories are mine, and not related to any grand nostalgia for like, snuggling in bed with my parents and watching It’s a Wonderful life as a family unit. Because of that, every single Christmas has always been different. Like when I was 23, my mom was in Nebraska and my dad gave me a heated blanket because he knows I’m always cold and it was a way to offset the expensive heat bill. When I was 21, I was in Wyoming with my college boyfriend’s family and it snowed and was a lovely memory. When I was 22, all 4 of my family members were under the same roof (bad idea) and got into a fight and my brother threw a tv out of a window onto our roof.

Generally how it’s worked since I graduated from college, and several years before that,  is that my brother usually opts to work because he makes more on the holidays because no one else is willing to work so he makes double; my dad and I might go out to eat or to a spur-of-the-moment matinee; my mom and I might go over to her friend (my godmother’s house), or she might have her own neighborhood friends over; and so it’s a very average kind of time with very little advance planning. People are always asking me what I’m “doing” for the holidays and I’m like “psh I don’t know, watching Felicity in bed?” (at my own apartment). Because I literally would do that on Christmas and be perfectly content and it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary. It’s one of the reasons I’m as independent as I am, because I don’t really have anyone to answer to in that sense. I’m used to just…creating my own events/logistics. If either one of my parents had re-married, things would be so completely different, but the truth of it is….when you literally have FOUR people in your entire family—and 2 of them are divorced, and 3 of them still live under the same roof together (mom + dad + brother, as it has been for nearly a decade)— what exactly ARE you going to do– have dinner together as a foursome?  It’s not like my mom can set up shop by the hearth that doesn’t exist and wrap presents for her 26 and 30 year old children who have their own lives, and have them over and serve hot cocoa while my dad cooks and joins in, because THEY’RE DIVORCED AND STILL LIVE TOGETHER IN THE SHACK I GREW UP IN. And don’t have the money to go anywhere as an alternative to being under each other’s feet (i.e.– a vacation, or even to go out to dinner). And said shack is devoid of the trappings of  “a home”, like furniture and decorations and a fridge with food in it, or silverware in a drawer (open a kitchen drawer  in that house and you’ll sooner find a dog toy than anything that’s actually supposed to be in a kitchen), because it’s not a home. It’s a structure–4 walls and a roof–under which 4 very different human beings can sleep and then wake up and conduct their separate lives (The 4th person being Michael, the Australian renter). There is no cozy common space where you gather under throw blankets to watch Homeland on Sunday nights, or bedrooms where you snuggle in bed and read a book. It’s just……a structure, with mattresses. And a red leather 1980′s couch that my dad acquired 15 years ago and has been chewed in half by the dogs. And that’s just been my reality since I was 14-ish and is totally my normal. We do our own thing, the 4 of us. There’s never been any warm sense in my mind of “coming home,” the way you see it in movies, TV, and Folger’s commercials, least of all at the holidays. I love them as individual PEOPLE, my family, but my sense of “home”, and as it pertains to “family,” is really really different than most of the people I’ve ever met, even ones who also come from divorced families. I would make my dorm-room at Dartmouth feel more in line with home than that which I had no real control of at my “home” in Maryland. A stocked mini fridge, serene, comforting, cozy, a nice big bed with tons of throw pillows that looked like a hotel or the ones in magazines. I have a vivid memory of a guy I was seeing, coming into my dorm room there, and saying “wow…….I’ve never seen a dorm room feel so…homey. It’s like I’m at my parents house in Colorado.” And I was SO proud he’d said that. I literally would turn my shoebox-sized dorm rooms into the homiest place you could ever be. With money I didn’t have on a JCPenny credit card. JC Penny.

And so, 2 of my family members at a time will hang out. Like my mom and I will have a low-key dinner where she gives me an adorable smattering of things she found at TJ Maxx…..while my dad and brother are in the next room watching an illegally downloaded movie together on a laptop my brother bought off Craigslist because there’s no TV or cable. And also the Australian renter who wears booty shorts and pays half the mortgage is also in the next room (Ting Ting Wang, the old Asian roommate moved out). And by ‘next room’ I mean, literally 2 feet away because the house is a literal garage. And everything above is why/how I just go where the wind takes me on holidays, and have since freshman year of college. So that’s why I totally GET why 99.9 percent of people ask me things like, “is it weird to not be with your OWN family on Christmas?” And I’m like….”uh, no, and it never has been.” Because my ‘family’ doesn’t DO things on Christmas. It’s kind of impossible to really…celebrate holidays until each divorcee creates a new life and a new chapter in a SEPARATE residence from one another. It’s the inherent nature of divorce, but especially the inherent nature of divorce when the people who were once married don’t then get re-married and build a new family and instead continue living together in the same house they bought before they had two children, for legal and financial reasons far too complicated to explain here. And that’s why by being with my boyfriend’s family, or anyone else’s,  I’m not “missing” a family event of my own. When my first “real” boyfriend and I began dating my junior year of college, I spent almost every Thanksgiving/Christmas with his fam for the duration that we dated.

I obviously adore/cherish spending time with my two crazy, unique parents INDIVIDUALLY and is something I cherish independent of “the holidays.” But you just can’t spend Christmas morning with people who can’t be within 1 inch of one another without fighting like Ricky and Lucy with higher stakes. When I stop by and my mom is downstairs, my dad stays upstairs. I’ll hang out with her, and then go upstairs and see him. Literally. (Or if there is a buffer, like Alex is over, we can exist in the same room except they just whipser-fight passive aggressively like they’re on stage, and we laugh at how they interact like an old married couple EXACTLY like George’s parents on Seinfeld, and then I silently thank Jesus Christ in heaven that I moved out and have a healthy, functional, beautiful relationship with a man like Alex and my own, homey, comforting, warm, inviting, dwelling where I CAN invite people over to and there’s silverware in the silverware drawer and bandaids in the medicine cabinet and food in the fridge and it feels like a home where the people living in it love each other and are happy to be there. That’s all I ever wanted.  And then Michel the Australian renter comes out of his room to make spaghetti in the kitchen in ass-tight track shorts while I think these thoughts). So, I look VERY much forward to a million traditions and vacations with the family I create one day, but until I literally create my own (i.e. have my own children when I’m mid 30′s probably), me, my mom, my dad, and my brother are  just 4 adult people doing our own thing in life. Except 3 of them still live together.

Which is ALL to say that Christmases in exotic locales, or exotic locales PERIOD are very special to me. They hold a kind of mythic place in my mind/heart. The only place I’ve ever been on vacation (like, not visiting someone, not studying in school, just straight VACATION) was Cabo, San Lucas Mexico, because I was invited along with my friend Whitney on her family’s trip there in 2009. I’ve written a post on this before, but the idea of “vacation” is really important to me and the tradition of an annual one is probably the #1 tradition I look forward to creating with my own family. As a kid, (and still to this very day, as evidenced by Palm Springs with Alex’s fam) the only vacations I went on were if I was invited by someone else’s family. I’ve also decided (after some pondering on the 5 hour plane ride home), that I think travel in your twenties– or at least a grand portion of your twenties–is defined by (1) visiting someone, (2) travelling to somewhere 2 hours a way or less, or (3) vacationing with your own family (or in my case, someone else’s). So like………..I have a friend who lives in New York City, I can visit New York City. I have family who live in Miami, Alex and I can travel to Miami. We have a friend who lives in New Orleans, we can travel to New Orleans. I have a best friend who lives in Los Angeles, we visit Los Angeles. My friends know someone who lives in the Carribean ,so they’re going there in January. They’re not just GOING to the Carribean, they’re going specifically and exclusively beCAUSE a friend literally lives/works there, so they have a home to stay at and it gives them an opportunity to spend time with said friend.  Or you go to a nearby place (hence my 2-hour drive qualification) such as Philly to DC, or West Virginia to DC, or whatever, where you drive Saturday morning, stay Saturday night, and come back Sunday afternoon. Or your family is going to Spain so you go with them. Lodging–anywhere–is SOOOO expensive, that I thusly think the decade of 20-30 and our income within that decade generally dictates that that you go where you know people, because that will inherently mean you have somewhere to stay. Because how often can you just be like GUESS WHAT– we’re going to The Cayman Islands, where we know no one, have no friends, have no one to stay with or visit, and our parents aren’t going and subsidizing the whole thing, nope, just US, two 26 year olds, going to to The Cayman Islands for one week on our dime. That shit is EXPENSIVE, like 3 grand expensive at least. So I don’t know; my point of that was to say that I think that’s how travel-in-your-20′s is defined; and I think that travel in your 30′s is probably when you start to be able to actually travel to somewhere not because/only because you have a friend you can stay with or your parents are going and you can go too.

So, all this to say, that when Alex and I started dating, I was 24 years old (2 years ago), and we started spending Christmas at his parent’s house outside of Boston. This year, in April, his parents decided that for the first time in 30 years, they wanted to spend Christmas *not* at home. His mom has always cooked for Christmas—a Porchini mushroom pot roast—and their kitchen was going to be remodeled this year so they weren’t going to be able to cook (and there would be literal construction dust and havoc). SO, they decided they wanted to go to sweet sweet California for the holiday, and obviously wanted to spend it with family and not just the 2 of them alone in California, so they treated both me and Alex to flights, rental car, rental house, the whole deal. UNREAL. Literally “all expenses paid” like we had won a giveaway from a car dealership, except no weird restrictions or resort food. We had been looking forward to it for MONTHS. At one point, I wrote “92 days until Palm Springs” on our chalkboard, and I literally feel like we time-traveled because those 92 days went by quicker than anything ever has.

The process of choosing the rental house was interactive and so fun to send links months before Christmas– in April, like “what about this one!” and “oh my god we’re moving here.” Alex and I were so on-board with the SUPER SUPER modern houses, that look like Frank Lloyd Wright and have all-glass and are futuristic and sparse:

But his parents, who grew UP in the mid-century era and are OVER it (haha, how time works is hilarious/amazing– his mom would see me going CRAZY in the design/furniture stores, and be like, ‘if you only KNEW the Eames-style teakwood furniture that was in my mother’s house, you would probably pass out’ because that’s just HOW people’s homes looked in the ’60′s), were not into it. Mid-century design is like, a too-close-for-comfort reminder of their childhood and Alex and I are like OHMYGOD A BERTOIA CHAIR!!! So they wanted something SPANISH style– arched doorways, barrel tile roofing, which is basically how the OTHER half of homes in Palm Springs are– very ranchy California and not The Jetsons– and they picked the best rental house EVER.

It was a white-washed stucco exterior, with barrel tile roofing, and a dusty little front with cacti everywhere. So california desert.

The inside had the cutest little Spanish kitchen and lots of Southwestern accents. The backyard was huge and gorgeousssssssssssss, literally nestled AT the base of the mountains, with a pool, gagillion seating areas, and beauuuutiful views.

There was like a hidden garden area (back there where the chairs are) that had a FIREPIT, and a covered porch area where we ate lunch outdoors several days:

The view from the barrel-tile roof:

It was the cutest, most perfect little home, and I have a FEELING it will see more Alina/Alex Christmases in its lifetime.

Oh, and it had a CASUAL grapefruit, orange, clementine, AND lemon tree. AYFKMRN??? That’s just like……rude. It was an EMBARRASSMENT of citrus riches. Who has a SINGLE tree dedicated EACH to lemons, grapefruit, clementine, AND oranges, in their mother fucking backyard. IT WAS MAGNIFICENT. IN FACT, Alex and I stole like 7 oranges and grapefruits before leaving on our last day (don’t tell his dad– he was worried we would like, de-earth the trees if we plucked the fruit and we were like 1.) this isn’t the Bible, and 2.) you don’t have FRUIT TREES ON YOUR RENTAL PROPERTY IF YOU DON’T EXPECT THE RENTERS TO PLUCK AND SUBSEQUENTLY EAT THE FRUIT), and AS I wrote this post in bed today, I sucked down the glorious juice of a fresh California grapefruit from our very rental house. THEY WERE THE BEST LEMONS, ORANGES, AND GRAPEFRUITS I’VE EVER HAD. I don’t mess with Clementines. Those average bitches. Who eats a clementine when an orange is on the next-door tree. A troll is who.

This was my first post in a SERIES of posts about our Christmas in Palm Springs. This one was some context and an introduction to our rental casa. I  am going to do posts based on each day of the trip, as well as LA, and some other things. Stay tuned. SO MANY PICTURES AND STORIES TO COME.  xoxo