Have you ever been to Jordan?

We're still in Palm Desert. Our various infections seem to be responding to the plethora of pharmaceuticals we are bombarding them with. We're going to LA tomorrow to see the kids and celebrate Immi's third birthday on Saturday. After that we're putting El Gato in storage here in the desert and driving home. We've decided to regroup and try to get back to some semblance of normal health before we launch the next phase of our Grand Adventure that has not been so grand for the past few weeks. Our plan is to start phase II sometime in March with an exploration of Arizona and New Mexico.

The photo attached to this post is a small clip of a large Christmas Golf Cart parade held at the Oasis Country Club where our friends Janet and Peter have a place. This is an annual event accompanied by Christmas carols and much conviviality.  Watching this happy event while sitting on J and P's beautiful patio trying to drown the bacteria in my lungs with a Sapphire gin martini I got to thinking how strange it is that people celebrate what is supposed to be a religious holiday with images of a fat guy who lives with elves and red nosed deer somewhere on a CO2 endangered ice flow in the far north.

I don't pretend to be an expert on religious holidays (Easter Bunny ... what's up with that?) however I have been to the Dead Sea and driven along the Jordan River ... indeed I've actually stood where John the Baptist supposedly baptized Jesus. So these are my limited creds regarding these comments. The point is there are many similarities between the geography of Jordan (Holy Land) and Palm Desert. They are both hot ... like, really hot. They have a large salt lake (Salton Sea/Dead Sea) and the flora and fauna are very similar ... camelweed and palm trees. The Jordan river valley is bordered by Israel with the ancient city of Jericho looking down on it from a high bluff and the desert communities of Southern California are overlooked by an equally high bluff on their southern edge.

What confuses me is if one celebrates Christmas as a religious holiday and one lives in a place that is the mirror image of where Christ was born, why does one feel compelled to import the fat guy and flying deer from the arctic? Moreover, why decorate pine trees when more than likely the trees that greeted Jesus at birth were palm trees just like the ones in PALM Desert?

I'm confused?