As is my tradition, I am celebrating Christmas in a warm place. It was 77 degrees the last time I checked. Shorts weather, baby. If 77 doesn’t make you merry this time of year, I’m not sure I can help you.
I’m not sure anyone can.
I’ve come to visit my sister and her family, and also long-time friends. Some, I see regularly. Others, it’s been a while. And those reunions are wonderful, most of the time.
Here’s what I’m not doing on my Christmas visit to sunny Southern California: hunting quail. Some have suggested all this holiday cheer with family has long been my ruse, designed to facilitate adventures in a warm place during winter so I could hunt desert quail.
Some wouldn’t be wrong.
There will be none of that this year. I’m here just for the holidays, and to see friends. My window of freedom from the classroom was too narrow this year. I’ve made a banzai run south for the holiday and to attend to some affairs that need attending to. I’ll be on the road by noon on Christmas Day so I’ll be back home in time for my required attendance at a 10-day academic retreat. No getting out of this one.
If I was a little more organized, I might have booked a flight to make the trip easier, but organized is usually not how I roll.
I’m OK leaving my side-by-side back home, this year at least. For a long while I never would have passed on a chance to hunt quail during the holidays, but some of that urgency is gone since I successfully hunted mountain quail and completed my quail slam of all six species native to the U.S. That energy was further stoked by the weather pattern down here the last few years, which manifested itself in a monsoon-induced epic quail season in 2024-25.
Sadly, the dry weather returned this year and things, while not terrible, were just OK this season. And anyway, there’s just too much to do now. One family home was sold a year ago, and after the passing of my mother’s husband — when she died, she’d been married to Doyle longer than she had my dad — there’s another residence to unleash on the real estate market.
I must admit, I occasionally dream of returning home permanently, so that I might enjoy 77-degree Christmas holidays without having to drive 1,000 miles. But my return visits always beat that desire out of me, rather quickly. The day of my arrival, I was stuck in a traffic jam that extended from Victorville to Riverside with scarcely an interruption of a mile or two of free-flowing traffic. That always makes me mutter, “Oh yeah. That’s why I left.
If you know that stretch of I-15 you know what a haul that is. Sometimes, the traffic jam extends from Los Angeles to Las Vegas.
If I had been so foolish, that house, a cozy two-bedroom with red tiled floors that stayed cool in the summer and an “orchard” of 10-foot-tall prickly pear cactus along the back fence, would have been the perfect place for my return. If only science had come up with a cure for bumper-to-bumper traffic.
Sadly, the weather’s about to change. There won’t be any snow here, down in the lowlands, but the mountains surrounding the greatest concentration of humans in the U.S. — east of the Mississippi, at least — will soon be decorated with the white stuff. Then, when the storm clears, they’ll shoot those postcard images of glistening orange groves and palm trees, with freshly dusted mountains in the background.
The traffic jam on the interstate will be artfully cropped from the image, of course.
Wherever you are, have a joyous holiday, filled with friends and family and no inconveniently drifted frozen water.