A Transplanted Midwesterner Celebrates His First Desert Holiday Season. By Gil Kaufman AFTER 26 HOLIDAY seasons in the midwest, where wet snow, frigid, skin-peeling winds and undifferentiated piles of gray slush are par for the course, I can't help but be confused by my first Christmas in the desert. Like most of the former midwesterners I've met since moving here from Chicago in October (I've yet to meet a native Tucsonan), I convinced myself that Tucson's mild winters were just one good reason among many to pull up stakes and leave the shovel and lock de-icer behind. Christmas has never been a big to-do in our house. Mainly because, as a child, I was too preoccupied with Chanukah to care what my gentile friends were doing. Even as an adult, in my capacity as one-half of an interfaith couple, I can't really get into the spirit, much to the chagrin of my girlfriend, who literally can't wait to bust out the lights, and who gets misty-eyed when she sees her first sign of Christmas, this year in August. But after a weekend with her relatives in Phoenix and a few weeks of careful observation at every outlet mall from here to Mesa, I can honestly say it's the little things you notice, even if they are a world away from the only one you knew. Avoiding the post-Turkey rush to bargain hunting, we merged into the mass hysteria that is the Tucson Mall a week early, and I felt a mild cultural vertigo wash over me. What are those, I wondered, inspecting a strange, healthy-looking, smiling creature in shorts ringing a bell near a red bucket. A sophisticated, bronzed panhandler? A street musician with a particularly lousy, one-note act? A closer look revealed the familiar Salvation Army logo on the pot, but this bell-ringer was like none I recognized. I thought about the huddled bundles of polypropylene and mittens that shuddered in drafty doorways along Michigan Avenue, clanging their bells as if the sound could somehow radiate even a sliver of heat. Where was the guilt factor in this soldier's routine? Where was that heart-piercing, sad-sack look that said, "Are you kidding me? You try standing out here all day, pal!" Even if I dropped a dollar in the pot, it wouldn't give me the satisfaction of thinking that maybe I was helping some poor soul get in from the cold that much faster. Once inside the mall I heard the familiar Christmas Muzak, saw plenty of ruby-red poinsettias and Santa cut-outs decorating the stores and window displays, but something was missing that I couldn't quite put my finger on. I watched as kids hopped up on Santa's creased lap, their sandals dangling near the top of his shiny boots, and I got my first whiff. Those red pants, they were too clean. As I kid, I remember going to the mall with a friend and his mother--who blithely assumed everybody celebrated Christmas--and being thrust up on Santa's lap for a photo-op. I remember it so vividly because the snaps on one of my boots came undone and I had to stand up in a pile of wet slush that laid at the feet of Old St. "Who's Next?". The bottom of his dark red trousers were caked with road slime from my dripping foot and countless others, and I ended up with a wet sock of goo in my boot. But the floors at Tucson Mall were spotless and Santa's pants were fresh from the North Pole Martinizer. The other glaring difference is that the harried shoppers all seemed to have visited Santa's Lobotomy Shop. Whereas bustling your way down Michigan Avenue in December was a dicey proposition at best, with the holiday spirit-less crowds threatening to dump you off the slick sidewalk into snarled traffic at any moment, if you didn't get knocked over or shoved out of the way first, these smiling folk walked gently and benignly amongst their fellow shoppers, raising their voices (and fists) only when confronted with a "sorry, no Tickle Me Elmo dolls in stock" sign. The clincher came when we went to buy our Christmas tree last week. My girlfriend seemed reluctant, even though I knew she'd been looking forward to it since Thanksgiving. "Am I really gonna buy a tree when it's 75 degrees outside?" she asked rhetorically, wishing she'd brought shades. We walked down the aisles of the makeshift (parking) lot, remembering the first tree we bought together, two years ago in Chicago. It was so cold the sap practically froze in crystalline balls on my gloves and the trees all had a very authentic dusting of snow that seemed almost too perfect to be real. "These don't smell right," she said, holding one at arm's length. We went round and round for more than 45 minutes, each tree failing the test for one reason or another. After much hand-wringing and intense smell testing, she decided on a nice little fir and we asked the attentive Boys Chorus assistant to snap a photo of us holding it in front of the 50-foot inflatable Frosty. "This will really blow their minds," she said, suddenly savoring the idea of showing the photo to her family when she journeys back to Ohio for the big day. I suppose it's just a matter of getting used to the slight differences: the multicolored lights seemingly suspended in air on spiny cacti trunks instead of strung through low, green bushes and tall, leaf-deprived oaks; lawn ornaments caked with red clay and sand instead of road grit; and windows painted with fake snow, but cracked open just a bit in the daytime to let in the warm December air. I asked a friend, a former New Yorker who migrated here more than a decade ago, if he still gets twinges of awkwardness this time of year. "I'll never get used to it," he said, his eyes dancing with visions of harried, red-nosed shoppers elbowing their way into the first warm cab. Then he admitted, "But I have."

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