Emma has, up to now, spent all of her winters in Southern California. Any ice she has seen has been cube-shaped and served in beverages. Imagine her reaction when she stepped on a puddle and its surface shattered into brilliant shards.

“It’s glass!” she told her mother.

I am a Northerner, born and bred. I have no memory of the wonder of my first ice-covered puddle. We take so much for granted. Emma may remember it for the rest of her life.

Until her recent move to Massachusetts and a whole different ocean, Emma grew up with a towering avocado tree in her back yard, home to opossums and roof rats and little darting lizards. She makes a mean guacamole. She understands a lot of Spanish. She had never seen ice skimming a puddle before. Even a mud puddle is a rarity where she comes from.

November! Never my favorite month — although many of my favorite people are Scorpios — it is particularly stressful in election years. Like many people these days from both sides of the aisle — as the phrase goes — I am exhausted by politics, and have not been listening much to the national news. However, I couldn’t help but overhear that past and future President Trump’s pick for Attorney General, Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Florida man, may be hampered by various accusations, among them the allegation that he has accepted improper gifts.

What makes a gift improper? What could the improper gifts have been?

Whoopie cushion. French tickler. White shoes after Labor Day? A girls’ bicycle with pink handlebar streamers? Never mind, I just want to drink my coffee in peace.

Aside from its political component, November ushers in Thanksgiving and with it the holiday season, with all of its complicated and interwoven commercial, emotional and religious elements. The pilgrims, those who survived that first year in Massachusetts, thanked God and possibly ate turkey. How does Santa’s visit gibe with the birth of Jesus?

I know people who have come up with all kinds of beliefs and suppositions which they call “spiritual.” A favorite dog who died in 1985 but still stops by sometimes at night. Selective ideas about who goes to Hell and what Jesus personally thinks about a certain ex-husband. Where people’s spirits go after death — perhaps to other planets in the solar system and beyond? — and whether extraterrestrials are involved.

Other people’s religions, often termed “pagan,” might seem crazy. They are considered outlandish, literally, since they are foreign or alien.

Elephant head? How many arms? Give me a break! Someone might say. Or take the gods and goddesses of the ancient Greeks and Romans. While very attractive (if the extant statues that portray them are any indication) they behaved badly. Their antics make for entertaining stories, but really! They acted like spoiled children, cheating on each other and fooling with human lives as if they were elite and entitled, which of course they were, technically, being gods and goddesses. Still, you wouldn’t want to raise your children to think that was OK. Sure, they were immortal, but they lacked gravitas.

All right, full disclosure, I was brought up Episcopalian and taught from an early age to respect other people’s religions and also my own. But have you taken a good look at the Old Testament lately?

Why do other people’s individual beliefs about the supernatural seem crazy when, viewed objectively, the tenets of our own religion may seem equally crazy if not crazier? Because, according to my reckoning, your spiritual or religious beliefs are considered crazy only if you think them up yourself. They need the stamp of an organized religion to make them respectable.

The novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez begins “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” I am inspired to read this strange and beautiful story again after many years because, on Dec. 11, Netflix is due to release a movie based on the book. It will be set in Colombia with a Spanish sound track and English subtitles. How will the magical realism genre in which Marquez wrote be conveyed through the medium of film?

I can’t wait to find out.

Have a good week!