My Willie Nelson Christmas
How the gravel-voiced country outlaw became my Santa Claus
The story of a discount CD that keeps on giving
The Easter Bunny is bogus, by the way
I didn’t grow up in the country, but my family liked to pretend as much around Christmas. We'd build a fire together, drink eggnog together, and decorate our tree together — just the four of us, my parents, my brother, and I. From our home’s vantage in south Los Angeles, upon a hillside once known for grazing and specialty row crops, our living room overlooked an endless basin of suburban pavement and twinkling city lights. Our tree always went in this awkward catty-corner beside the living room windows — where it'd be secured into its stand and given a perimeter skirt of linen snow — and the singular soundtrack to our adorning was Christmas with Willie Nelson. It was a pleasant scene, too pleasant for my liking. I envied my father’s childhood in the outskirts of Milwaukee, where it actually snowed. He found my longing for extreme weather ridiculous. So to deter me, he told stories of walking to school in nipple-high drifts and shoveling dirty slush on the weekends. To him, LA was an …
