The Sweaty Santa Theory

On Thursday we grilled the turkey. I know, I know. The whole idea of plopping a 16-pound bird on a wire rack and standing over it, fork in hand, sounds like a bad joke.

Initially, in fact, I had resisted the grilling thing when my niece proposed it. She’s from Virginia and doesn’t understand the cultural risks.

In Southern California, I explained to her, you have to be careful about stuff like this. Try it and, sure enough, some guy is going to spring out of the bushes and start snapping pictures. Then the pictures will show up in newspapers all across the country with captions like: “Grinning idiot in Los Angeles thinks turkey is a hamburger, tries to grill it.”

Still, she had this recipe that claimed you could grill a turkey. As it turns out, the whole trick is to lower the lid and sort of smoke it. So we did, and sat in deck chairs while the sun blazed in the sky and the smoke rose. A fine November smog covered the city, and we could watch the smoke mixing in the yellow air.

That’s the way it goes with Thanksgivings here, no? You end up on the deck, watching the smog gather, cooking a turkey on a grill. The day is perfect, sunny and warm.

And strange. Los Angeles Thanksgivings, on the deck or otherwise, can occasionally produce a sense of cultural dislocation. Some small voice tells you that you are not supposed to wear shorts on Thanksgiving, you’re not supposed to cook turkey on a grill. It’s the sense of having wandered onto the wrong planet.

I have a friend who loves Los Angeles--well, he likes it, at least--but cannot tolerate the place during the holidays. Warm, sunny Thanksgivings unnerve him. The sight of plastic Santas hanging from palm trees along Wilshire Boulevard makes him want to scream.

“I have to leave town,” he says. “God did not intend for man to enjoy beach weather between Thanksgiving and New Year’s.”

Of course, he’s from Somewhere Else. He grew up in a place where it made sense to children that Santa wears a heavy red coat. But I don’t think he’s alone. I know some natives who find it unsettling to wake up Christmas morning with a sky scrubbed warm and clear by the Santa Anas.

I remember once, 20 years ago, a bunch of us decided to have a “real” Thanksgiving. We rented a house in the mountains near Big Bear and lugged our turkey and dressing up the hill. On the second day, it snowed. We ran outside as if we had hit the jackpot, catching the snowflakes on our gloves.

After three days, we came back. In Los Angeles, no snow had fallen. The city was warm, sunny and perfect. We felt like escapees from Paradise who had just returned from a three-day binge of bad weather.

I have a theory that this perfect-weather syndrome explains the depopulation of Los Angeles during Christmas and, to a lesser degree, on Thanksgiving.

In any city, of course, many people leave during the holidays. But common logic suggests that a roughly equivalent number of visitors should arrive to replace them. I mean, people in Chicago and Houston have to go somewhere, right?

Except it doesn’t work out that way. Exhaustive scientific research has shown that except for the brief visitation by Rose Bowl fanatics, Los Angeles’ population falls dramatically during the holidays.

For example, have you ever studied those helicopter TV shots of Interstate 5 on the days preceding Christmas? A river of iron always flows north. At night, the shots reveal a ribbon of red brake lights extending a hundred miles into the valley. These people really want to get out of town.

By rights, an equal river of iron should flow south a day or so later as our visitors arrive. Aunts and cousins coming from hither and thither.

But all we get is a trickle. The incoming doesn’t match the outgoing. And that’s proof, dear friends, of the deep disquiet our city breeds in its citizens during the holidays.

After all, did not Christmas begin as a pagan festival meant to express defiance of winter’s darkest, coldest days? It is no accident, we now know, that Christmas takes place at the winter solstice, or very close to it. People needed an excuse to huddle together and reassure one another that the light would return.

But in Los Angeles, the light never dies. You walk into an Eddie Bauer store in mid-December and wonder why they’re selling those heavy coats because, just outside, the sun is eye-hurting bright and people are walking around in T-shirts. You leaf through the L.L. Bean catalog and can find nothing that pertains to your situation.

“My God!” the English writer Aldous Huxley once said during a sojourn here. “Can’t anyone switch off the sun, even for an hour?”

As a matter of fact, no. A couple of years ago, just before Christmas, I was walking down a Wilshire Boulevard sidewalk with my son, who was then 5 and in the throes of Santa love. We passed a sidewalk Santa standing next to a collection bucket.

Santa had the bad luck to be standing on the sunny side of the street. He should have been wearing OP trunks and several generous coats of Bullfrog. But no, he was Santa, encased in his suit.

His bell ringing faltered. Sweat ran down his cheeks. He looked trapped.

“Santa needs some air conditioning,” Casey said.

Actually, Santa needed snow and ice. But Casey, an L.A. native, didn’t know from snow and ice. He only knew that this strange creature, the hero of Christmas, perpetually overdressed for the occasion.

Still, it’s not all downside. On Thursday, for example, we had the neighborhood all to ourselves, everyone else having fled. We sat around the deck, conducting our turkey experiment, in utter tranquillity.

We shot some hoops on a deserted basketball court next door. We watched the sun go down. And, when the time came, we lifted the turkey off the grill and discovered that it tasted just fine.

In fact, I’d recommend it to anyone.