I didn’t grow up in the country, but my family liked to pretend as much around Christmas. We built a fire together, drank copious amounts of eggnog, and decorated our tree — generally just the four of us, my parents, brother, and I. From our home’s vantage in south Los Angeles, upon hillsides once known for grazing and specialty row crops, our living room overlooked an endless basin of pavement and twinkling city lights. The tree always went in the same spot, this awkward catty-corner beside the windows, and the soundtrack was always Christmas with Willie Nelson.  I remember being envious of my father’s childhood in the outskirts of 1940s Milwaukee, where it actually snowed. He found my longing for extreme weather ridiculous, and told stories of walking to school in nipple-high drifts (uphill both ways, of course) and shoveling dirty slush on the weekends to deter me. To him, LA was an unparalleled paradise, but there was no convincing me of how good we had it, with our palm trees and …