I suppose that the Christmas traditions we cling to the most as an adult are the ones we enjoyed the most as children. This means that, for some people, pine trees covered with lead-foil tinsel are a must. For others, if the family wassail doesn’t contain fresh pineapple juice, why, it’s simply unacceptable. And, of course, if somebody doesn’t sing about the time their Grandmother got run over by a reindeer—what kind of holiday season is that?
This being the case, you can imagine what it was like for my wife and me when my parents invited us to spend our 1972 holiday season with them in their new home. This meant that the celebration wouldn’t be held in Northwestern Washington where I had been raised (and where Christmas was done correctly), but in the red rock town of Peach Springs, Arizona, where Dad had taken a job managing the local trading post—a place, I surmised, that would not be the least bit in sync with our family’s time-honored traditions.