Twelfth Night - or what you will.

Here we are the twelfth day of Christmas – January 6th – one of the first Shakespeare plays I played in was Twelfth Night (or what you will) and the twelfth day of Christmas is usually the day when you take down the
Christmas trimmings and put the Christmas tree out or, if it's a false one, back into the box.

But the first thing I noticed when I moved here was the Christmas trees being thrown out the day after Christmas, or within the next few days, and everybody going back to work.

No Boxing Day like in England, no St Stephen's Day like in Ireland; just a bald one day Christmas.

No full afternoon of sport, horse racing on the TV, cold turkey and ham sandwiches, no taking of the Alka Seltzer to get over the hangover – no nothing!!!!

Back to normal.

I know there are firms here who give the staff the week off but at my wife's company they just get the one day for Christmas. The fact that she only went back to work this week after Christmas is nothing to go by as the company shut for the week and didn't pay their employees; she is being paid but that comes our of her annual vacation time; how pathetically Scroogy is that?

Now I live here in America and I believe that when in Rome live like the Romans – not that all the Americans who go to Rome live like Italians as they still look for their 'Holiday Inn' when there – so I try to live as much as I can like the Americans; well not necessarily the Americans more like Los Angelinos.

So I get pancakes at breakfast once a week at the Fig Tree on the beach, I wear shorts most of the time, I call Office Depot Office Deepoe and I call Ralphs – Ralphs.

An English public schoolboy I was talking to the other day was calling it Rafes, which is the public school way of saying Ralphs (public school being the aristocrats and upper classes of England, by the way, and not the American version which they call private school) – you would think the English would call their posh private schools something other than a public school wouldn't you?

So back to Christmas – I have been here for fifteen years and I am only just realising that most Americans only have turkey at Thanksgiving.

We had to pay through the nose this year for our turkey as we had bought our turkeys other years when they were cheap at Thanksgiving and put them into the freezer; this year we were sick at Thanksgiving but not as sick as we were when we paid all that money for a turkey!!