Just like the ones I used to know. Because it's a dry summer in South Africa, where I grew up. And that's where our Christmas will be. That is, if we can live through the flight odyssey with Crabtot.

Trek aside, I can't wait for Christmas in South Africa. After several icy Wyoming winters lasting nine months, I could use some sun and a naked child playing with a bucket and spade. And after all the Christmas mania we're mired in here, I could use a half-baked sort of Christmas, which is what you get in SA. Everyone too hot to shop. Everyone too lazy to take it too seriously.

Indeed, traditional Christmases always seemed out of place where I grew up. In a land of drought and with summer in full blaze on the day of Jesus' birth, classic Christmas festivities were always a half-hearted affair, at least where Crabmom's family was concerned. When we were very young, we'd decorate a poor parched pine tree and we would boil and sweat through the glazed hams and turkey feasts. But then my mom decided Christmas traditions were totally irrelevant to African life. Thus Christmas grew progressively weirder and more pared down. One year our tree was a mere stick of bamboo wrapped with tinsel. The following year Mom produced a tree made of barbed wire, its only decoration a Goldilocks-brand pot scourer (gold fuzzy wire ball procured from beneath the kitchen sink). "That's an angel," Mom explained, popping the wire ball on top of the wire tree. "We're going minimalist this year."

I was none too taken with our minimalist Christmases. Growing up, my holiday fantasies consisted of what we saw on Christmas cards and advent calendars: proverbial snowy hamlets thick with evergreens, where kids skated on frozen ponds and tiny lights twinkled in the snow...a magical Christmas fantasy that, um, is Christmas in Crabtown. To a tee.

Ah, traditional Christmas! The children playing in the snow! The smell of Crabtown pine needles, the holiday chills and blazing fireplaces. I guess I'll miss it this wintry hamlet after all. Just as right now all I can do is dream of barbed wire trees, a pot scourer angel, and a seafood spread for Christmas lunch. You know, there's nothing nicer than going swimming on a hot Christmas day. (Except maybe sledding down a hill in a mountain hamlet.)

And so the holidays become yet another classic Crabmommy glass-half-empty experience. She dreams of there when she is here and wants to be here when there. Sound familiar? Cheers anyway! Let's have an early eggnog. Make that an ice-cold G&T!