This Christmas the Texas daughter and her family will not be coming this way for the holidays so I went to Austin for a pre-Noel visit. I wanted to make sure she didn’t miss anything not being in California. We talked about doing some of our traditional things, maybe go to the Nutcracker or a Christmas concert. But in keeping with the spirit of Austin, a city proud of its weirdness, we opted for new traditions.

First was a Julia Child dinner party where guests were urged to bring recipes from Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Our hosts dressed as Julia and Paul, one in polyester knit dress and high heels and his partner in goatee and beret. We dined on dishes awash in butter and cheese and trilled “bon appetit’ in our most flamboyant Julia voices while visions of the real Julia flashed on a big screen next to a Christmas tree.

At another Austin holiday gala we mingled with the pretty people in a cocktail lounge of a downtown hotel where the bar stools are made out of hairy white cowhide. When she lived in San Francisco daughter Sam and her sisters and girlfriends would put on their holiday glitz and take over a bar in one of the city’s hotels. Not yet having a core group in Austin she invited a random mix of women she met through her book club, the neighborhood, the gym and a stepmothers group to dress in their merriest and meet for drinks. They showed up and brought friends. I was the token import, dressed in Wine Country casual and wishing for a pair of cowboy boots.

She’ll be fine in Texas for Christmas. Her new Austin ways mix well with a number of California holiday favorites. She’s made her grandmother’s Russian tea cookies. For Christmas dinner she’ll make the family spinach and walnut salad, as well as some new dish “from Julia.”

Her tree is decorated with familiar ornaments. I spotted the tiny rocking horse made out of red felt that her grandmother gave her when she was two. And she still has the music box covered with Santa elves from when she was a baby. It’s pretty beat up but still produces a jaunty “Jingle Bells.”

Christmas is not always so portable. There were two Christmases that I spent without any family. They were the years my husband and I lived in Germany and although our daughters were in California I looked forward to the two of us having a cozy, festive holiday in Europe. The first Christmas my husband, flying from Nairobi to Frankfurt, ended up stuck at an airport in London, leaving me with the cat. Some friends took pity and asked me to dinner, and the traveler got back late that night but in time for dessert.

Another Christmas the two of us took the train to Italy to a small mountain village where it snowed and was perfectly festive until Santa took a slip on the ice outside the hotel on Christmas Eve. A cab driver, heaped in holiday good will, took him down the mountain to a hospital to have x-rays on his back. He was okay but they kept him overnight for observation and I returned to the hotel to drink Chianti with the ghosts of Christmas past.

This year the family will be at home for Christmas, both in California and Texas. And God bless us everyone for Skype.

Susan Swartz is an author and journalist in Sebastopol, Ca. You can also read her at www.juicytomatoes.com and hear her Another Voice commentary on KRCB-FM radio on Fridays. Email is susan@juicytomatoes.com

We hear it every summer from visitors. “Why is it so brown here?” they ask, especially the ones who come from green summer places. They ask it almost accusingly, like there’s been a mistake. They point to the California hills as if we hadn’t noticed that they are not the standard color for the season.

The answer is that brown is our summer color. Our summers are dry. Nobody’s walking through our hills with a watering can. It doesn’t rain here like it does in the green summer places. If they want a green California they should come back in late winter or early spring, when their home ground is still hard and frozen and we are so green we squeak.

I sympathize. I grew up in places with humid green summers and for a long time the California brown looked alien. Wild west and untamed. Naked and brazen. And I can still get a longing for a leafy dripping landscape and extravagant rolling lawns. I came across a newspaper photo of a summer scene of upstate New York that was so drenched and verdant I wanted to do a scratch and sniff.

But I’m a Californian. This is my chosen turf. And in summer I accept that brown is our green.

My California daughter tells her frowning New York friends to think of the summer color as golden if brown turns them off. Golden sounds more lively and cheerful but there are ways to spin brown. The hills of summer look like a nice baguette. They are the shade of a rich café au lait. How about, the color of a used saddle? Or an old rumpled corduroy jacket?

I once described the California summer hills as looking like teddy bear tummies. Fuzzy brown and soft. Of course, they appear more soft than they actually are. Get up close and those grasses are prickly. Alive with slithery creatures. Dogs run through and come home full of foxtails. And there’s always a worry about fire because they look like they’re already half-scorched.

In summer, brown is our green

Last week I drove with friends through the dry back country to a party at a sheep farm in Petaluma. That all-beige backdrop makes it so much better to see stands of black cows and wild turkeys and the neon bright jerseys from a steady stream of bicyclists.

The party, a fundraiser for the upcoming Sonoma County Book Festival which happens on Sept. 19, was one of many summer celebrations of the good stuff that grows up and over and all around these hills. Author Jonah Raskin read from his new book “Field Days: A Year of Farming, Eating and Drinking Wine in California.” We got dust in our sandals and ate all-local ratatouille and goat cheese pizza with syrupy sun-gold tomatoes.

As we drove home the fog started to come in. Visitors often don’t appreciate our fog either. How comes the nights are so cold, they grumble. The fog is our natural misting machine. And sometimes when the sun is dropping away and the fog is sliding in, those hills don’t look all that brown. They look kind of, well… some might call them mauve.

Photo courtesy of Michelle Pereira