Pre-Christmas, Santa Claus travels without passport or quarantined reindeer, to parade from Scarborough harbour to Boyes Department store, and wanders in Massachusetts through the Natick mall, showing his face at school plays, street markets and craft fairs.

On Christmas Eve in America, he slides down chimneys to collect children's letters with milk and cookies (plus carrots for his reindeer). In Yorkshire, he sips a glass of sherry with his mince pie
before departure.

My Scarborough friend grew up with indoor decorations only. A real tree (passers-by could glimpse it through a living room window) was draped with lights that had to be checked one bulb at a time if the string failed.

Her younger sister, who licked coloured strips of paper, gummed at one end for paper chains, helped twine ivy in the banisters and collect holly from the woods. Nowadays, she buys her holly, reckons most people have switched to artificial trees – also a practical American trend. It saves vacuuming pine needles.

But the smell of genuine pine is missing. I also miss the trouble it took to cut a fresh tree in the woods, tie it
to the car roof, soak it overnight in a bucket of water, struggle to centre it on a stand, drag it outdoors on Twelfth Night, pour melted suet mixed with sunflower seed over it, and watch the birds arrive.

Our homemade strings of popcorn and cranberries have given way to store-bought ornaments. Elaborate outside lights dress many American homes today. The glitziest feature bulbs framing the house and windows to outline a nativity tableau on the lawn with Santa, sled and reindeer defined on an icicle-edged roof.

As an American, I feel quite at home on an English Christmas. Many elements are familiar – caroling, parties at work, church services, charity greeting cards, Advent calendars.

Scarborough's switch-on ceremonies at Woolworth's parallel Town Tree Lightings on New England Commons, although
we have girl scouts with cocoa and cookies, rather than a local princess with a magic wand.

We, too, fill Christmas stockings with candy, small toys and an orange in the toe. They dangle from fireplace mantels in living rooms, although not always. A young mother who grew up in Scarborough recalls: "I could feel the weight of a full stocking at the end of the bed on Christmas day morning, and this meant I could wake up."

The Toy Retailers' Association top 10 choices in both our countries indicate very similar tastes in our children.

For Christmas dinner, all the stops are pulled out. American menus can vary regionally – Turkey teriyaki in Hawaii, oysters and ham pie in Virginia, tamales in the Southwest, Scandinavian lutefisk
in the upper Midwest. The mainstays of the English table are featured in New England.

Turkey, whether farm fresh organic or Butterball products, is almost a requirement for our Thanksgiving dinner, but we don't mind eating it again only a month later. As children, we whistled at live turkeys (it drives them nuts); as experimental adults, we've cooked the birds slow, fast, naked, bacon-stripped, brown bagged, brined, grilled, deconstructed, right side up, upside down, with herbed bread stuffing inside the cavity, under the skin, in separate pans, or on stove tops.

The Christmas turkey that Julia Cunningham roasts in Scalby, near Scarborough, is served early afternoon with gravy and a rotation of sides – among them sausage meat, chestnut stuffing, crispy roast potatoes, honey glazed carrots, Brussels sprouts, parsnips. My Burniston friend contributes her deliciously idiosyncratic bread sauce and cranberry sauce to the meal. She makes the







former by studding an onion with cloves like a pomander ball and the latter by chopping uncooked berries and oranges with sugar.

I have eaten this wearing the paper crown that came with a motto and a trinket out of Christmas crackers, which I'd never seen before. Though I'm told that the bang does not always work, the gifts are not very good, and the jokes are not funny, I enjoy crossing arms to form a circle around the table and pulling until the snap.

I missed a chance to introduce Christmas crackers to the States. A British friend who came to visit brought a box of miniatures. They arrived not with a bang, but a whimper: US Customs detonated the dozen and handed back torn tissue paper, crowns, mottos and trinkets.
Like many hostesses, Julia offers fruit salad as an alternative dessert to traditional Christmas pudding. But who can forgo her sauce – one pound of butter, one and a half pounds of soft brown sugar, two teaspoons of grated nutmeg and a wineglass of rum?

About three o'clock, we listen to the Queen's brief Christmas Message. American leaders have never addressed the nation on Christmas afternoon, and this would not be a good time for our incumbent President to start.

Americans know that December 26 is St Stephen's Day, when Good King Wenceslas looked out – but few understand Boxing Day. A retired teacher with Scarborough relatives says not many people, if any, give Christmas boxes nowadays. "I might give something to my window cleaner, on the first occasion that I see him after Christmas. But I no longer have a milkman and never see my postman – several different ones." In America, the US Postal Service requests that civil servants receive no cash tips.

We are not as good walkers as you are. On the day after Christmas, we might see a movie or take children to the Boston Ballet's formal annual production of The Nutcracker. We don't have what sounds like a jolly family day out – pantomimes in local village halls theatres, community centres, or nearby cities. Alex Huntley, in year 11 at Driffield School, goes to the Theatre Royal panto in York "to see adults prancing around and making fools of themselves," with grandmother, Jo Huntley of Wetwang.

The major difference in our winter holidays may be the weather. Growing up on the Eastern seaboard, I shared Bing Crosby's dream of a "White Christmas" and the lyrical wish of Winter Wonderland's composer: "Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow. "

Yuletide in Massachusetts is often textured with rosy cheeks, scarves wrapped like bandages, snow boots crunching 10 inches of snow, numb fingers, ice sculptures, life-size snowmen with carrot noses and raisin eyes and temperatures of –16C – actually –30C with the wind chill that makes walking into a room with a blazing wood fire especially splendid.
So I'm still surprised on my winter visits in Scarborough to find that the air is often around 10C, the streets clear, and roses in bloom. No one is ice-skating on the Scalby duck pond or skiing across the moors. The paperboy still rides his bicycle to make deliveries.

In almost every English-speaking country, Auld Lang Syne is sung at the stroke of midnight, ushering in a clean start to a New Year of resolutions as well as kissing at dance parties and pubs.

In America, we watch a televised giant ball descend in New York's Times Square. In Scarborough, while crowds in Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus listen to the chimes of London's Big Ben, fireworks, legally bought, explode.

Consumer fireworks are banned by five New England states, including Massachusetts, but on a Boston street corner, I've purchased something else to send skyward on New Year's Eve. A vendor offers helium balloons and red cardboard tags printed "Good Riddance to.…" Fill one out, attach it to the balloon, and let your personal "bad rubbish" lift off in an act of catharsis.

On New Year's Day, New Englanders have no traditional good luck dinner, unlike southerners who claim that Hoppin' John, made with black-eyed peas, is lucky food ensuring good fortune.

Even one popular sit-down meal in the dining room – glazed baked ham with pineapple slices and scallop potatoes – may lose out to pizza, chicken wings and beer in front of TV sets in the den, where many Americans watch the Roses Bowl football game, while The Coney Island (NY) Polar Bear Club and Scarborough's "Sons of Neptune" both plunge into the sea for charity dips.

"When I was little," Philip Johnson, a retired librarian and archivist from York tells me, "Twixmas had not been invented, and New Year's Day for many was not even a holiday. But we have been culturally influenced by America."

Whatever the holidays' external elements, ultimately, the internal ones matter most: "It's the family, not the food," one American says, "I don't care if we eat Cheez-It crackers out of a bowl as long as we're all together."

All happy families are the same and every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, according to Tolstoy.

It's Christmas or New Year's gatherings which remind us that family is forever.

Dramatist Dodie Smith recognises that when she wrotes a final toast: "To the family, that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor in our innermost hearts ever quite wish to."