This year we’re spending Christmas at home, our home, the home we’ve created for ourselves in Brooklyn. It feels different and special.

Usually we spend Christmas on the farm in Northern California, where Husband grew up. It is a holiday imbued with family traditions: mulled cider, Mexican creches placed throughout the house, handmade advent calendars, a tall, potted Christmas tree decorated with handmade ornaments and heirlooms.

In the days before and after Christmas, we spend quality, family-togetherness time with Husband’s family playing scrabble, working on puzzles, watching old movies together. It is a model of a perfect family Christmas.

And there are no fights. There’s barely an unpleasant word uttered.

The days before we fly off to Oakland on Jet Blue, I usually find myself feeling anxious and sad. While I enjoy our special trips to California, it is still difficult to leave my family behind during the holidays.

As I have spent 18 Christmases in California, I don’t even know what it’s like to spend the holidays in New York. All my sensorial associations with Christmas are Californian: the smell of eucalyptus, warmish weather, ranch housea —  in a big sky landscape — festooned with Christmas decorations.

In California, we spend Christmas in two worlds – the timeless world of a family farm in the Central Valley of Northern California not far from the Sierras. AND, just miles away, the suburban-freeway-mall-mutiplex-stripmall-SUV-world that is everywhere in California.

I love being on the family farm for its beauty, its quiet, its connection to nature and the way things grow; I am grateful for the fact that I have had the opportunity to be a part of that. The romance of California looms large for me and  I even love the suburban freeway mall-multiplex-stripmall-SUV-world because it is exotic to me and interesting (sociologically, anyway). We usually go to San Francisco and Berkeley which is like candy for me. After a few days on the farm I am desparate to explore two truly great cities less than 80 miles away.

But this year, we find ourselves here. The decision was made about a month ago. And it’s turned out to be a good decision, afterall. Our babysitterandsomuchmore says, "There was a reason for this. There was a reason."

Indeed. Husband started a new job (it was an offer he couldn’t refuse) that he hadn’t even heard about a month ago. He rode his bike to work on Wednesday, his first day on the job and the 2nd day of the transit strike.

We’re all busy. Son has a gig on New Year’s Eve at the Liberty Heights Tap Room. Daughter is thrilled to be decorating our house and creating a Christmas/Hanukah that feels like us.

For me, I am near friends and family — and that feels very special. I can still go to my office to write, which I really want to do. I’ll go running in Prospect Park and ice skating at Kate Wollman Rink. We might even check out the decorations in Dyker Heights. I’ll meditate. We’ve got a bunch of parties to go to. If there’s downtime, there are closets to clean, things to organize…

At home in Brooklyn, we’re finding out what our friends and family do while we’re in California. And we’re learning  what we want to do as a family and what this time means to us, here, in Brooklyn.

Christmas Eve, we’re having a dinner party. In homage to California, I am setting the table with Husband’s grandmother’s Wedgewood plates. There will be ceramic bowls and serving dishes handmade by my mother-in-law, and mulled cider on the stove.

But I can’t replace the smell of Eucalyptus and lavender growing outside the house, the scrabble games with family, Aunt Beth’s almond Roca, eating "befores" from Trader Joe’s, watching my kids play with their cousins, Son reading his father’s TinTin books in the kid’s room, Daughter learning to sew on her grandmother’s sewing machine, lighting sparklers in the backyard on New Year’s Eve…

But this year we’re doing it here. In our home, the home we’ve created in this apartment in Brooklyn.

The two photographs, by Hugh Crawford, were taken on the farm in California.