With Christmas done and New Year’s Eve and Day on the way, we are in that mid-holiday-week limbo. I’m not a fan of such indecision – on with the weekly recap…
Cookies for Santa from a friend.
A Boston holiday tradition evolves.
A Christmas tradition coda with Chris.
A Christmas message for you and yours.
Christmas counter-programming.
Why do appetizers taste better when served on fancy toothpicks?
There were no Dazzlers of the Day! Send me some names on who should be featured…
Why do appetizers taste better when eaten with a fancy toothpick?
Eat a meatball with a fork and it’s like, ok, not bad.
Eat a meatball with a fancy toothpick and it’s like, va-va-va-voom – this is delicious!
“May the roof above us never fall in, and may we friends gathered below never fall out.”
Being fourteen years old was one of the most exciting times of my life. Not quite old enough to fully step into adulthood, but old enough to experience many of its enchantments and brush up against the young man I was going to be, it contained the best of both worlds. Part of me also understood in a way that none of my peers seemed to understand, how lucky we were to be just fourteen, and still clinging to the innocence and hope and happiness that childhood, at its best, affords to the fortunate.
When my niece and nephew turned fourteen, I advised that they make the most of it, embrace each day, and savor this time in their lives. They’ve already been touched by loss in ways that I hadn’t at that age, so perhaps it’s too late. That’s still sound advice for any age, and I should probably take more of it myself. With the tenderness of that time in my mind, I threw them their first grown-up dinner party, and invited their respective boyfriend and girlfriend, whom I had not met. Every dinner party should have elements of excitement, awkwardness, sparkle, and uncertainty. (And meeting me for the first time usually has all of that and more.)
Originally I had planned on just having dinner and sending them on their merry way, but friends of mine who have children kept asking what we were going to do, at which point I realized that teenagers might need to be entertained, especially as I didn’t want everyone just lamely resorting to their phone. And so I put a little more organizational effort into the evening (in addition to making Patti LaBelle’s Over the Rainbow Mac and cheese, appetizer meatballs, and a batch of collard greens).
We began the evening with a custom that the twins and I have had for a while: the Circle of Trust. Banishing all responsible adults from the vicinity (in this case that was just Andy), it’s an opportunity to share whatever is on anyone’s mind. The twins are comfortable enough with me simply to talk – I figured that two new people would not be as forthcoming, so I printed out a bunch of questions and sprinkled them into a bowl, where we would each randomly select one and answer it.
I thought we would do one round and call it a day but they wanted to go through the whole bowl of questions, so we did. At the end of that it was time for dinner, and I passed around the Goblet of Toasts, which had several toasts printed that we each read – some silly and saucy, some sweet and sentimental.
Since the twins haven’t been too keen on dessert of late, I had some Christmas sweet treats from Andy that Ryan assembled on the platter in the feature photo. They then suggested we play pool and chess in the cellar, so I went down with them and promptly lost a chess game to Ryan – which is my first loss in decades – perhaps a sign of passing the torch on to the next generation. It feels like time. There were several pool matches after that, and none of us were very good at it, which made for a relatively level playing field. Planting a hopeful seed in the wintry ground, Emi and I discussed a theme for summer and settled on one – she came up with last summer’s coquette theme, and this one seems similarly scintillating.
As the evening wound down, I wondered if any of the teenagers would remember this night years from now; fourteen was the age when I started making the memories that I still have to this day. Even with having written this brief recollection down in a blog post, I’m likely to forget all the details by next week. I asked everyone to write down their favorite moment of the evening in an effort to remember (usually we do a rose and thorn with one good and one bad, but I wanted to end the evening on a purely good note so we omitted the thorns). One person wrote down their positive and insisted on adding a negative as well, which was as follows: “Not enough time here.”
When it was time for us to bring everyone home, we looked outside and saw that a heavy fog had descended during our dinner party, making the ride to Amsterdam something out of a surreal dream – the ideal accompaniment and ending to a dinner party of sparkling enchantment.
“May the best of our past be the worst of our future.”
I don’t see it. Is this zebra moving?
Some say it is, some say it isn’t.
I’m in the naysayer camp.
This Sunday morning post has been brought to you by sleep-deprivation.
This purgatorial place between Christmas and New Year’s Day used to be a space of joy, when I was a kid and on vacation, when I was in college and on break, when there was magic on the eves of both those bookends. Now we have to find magic in different ways – no, we have to make magic happen, because life doesn’t just hand you anything when you’re no longer a kid. Growing up is the sad realization of this, and it happens over and over. Some people try to recapture it, to prolong their childhood – adults still playing at life, afraid or unable or simply refusing to mature. Some people give in to it early, then learn later to find the play and the fun again. Some are just trying to get through the damn day.
I’m not sure where I’m falling these days, but I’m somewhere in the middle of it all, like most of us. Trying to be better than the day before, trying to be ok with when I’m not.
“It takes the rare spirit to convince them to flock with those unlike them.” – Gregory Maguire
This evening marks what is the first grown-up dinner party that I am throwing for the twins and their guests. It’s a bit early (my first attendance at an adult dinner party was when we were planning Suzie’s return from her exchange year in Denmark which was when I was about seventeen) but at fourteen the twins are already growing up faster than anyone wants to admit.
When they asked what the dress code was, I blurted out ‘casual elegant‘ since that seemed like the easiest thing to do, in my particular mind, which may not be the mindset of the average teenager – but who the hell wants to be average? Let’s lift it. And so it’s an outfit of sequins for me, to highlight a sparkling theme as we near the finale of the year. There are a few surprises in store, some conversation sparkler-starters, and the requested comfort food dinner of macaroni and cheese (Patti LaBelle’s Over the Rainbow Mac and Cheese to be precise).
Watching the twins grow up has been one of the joys of my life – and with little Jaxon just starting out on his journey we’re not done yet. If there’s one thing I hope they pick up from their crazy Uncle Al, it’s that they keep their hearts and minds open to people who may be different from them, that they forge their own paths of goodness and decency even when it’s not popular or accepted, and that they always try to do what’s right even when it’s not the easiest way.
“Watching the world wake up, dress itself in the dark, take on its daily guise, reminds me of how we fathom human character when we encounter someone at a distance, at a gallop, in the shadows. We get no more than a quick glance at the man on the street, the child in the woods, the witch at the well, the Lion among us. Our initial impression, most often, has to serve.
Still, that first crude glimpse, a clutch of raw hypotheses that can never be soundly clinched or dismissed, is often all we get before we must choose whether to lean forward or to avert our eyes. Slim evidence indeed, but put together with mere hints and echoes of what we have once read, we risk cherishing one another. Light will blind us in time, but what we learn in the dark can see us through.
To read, even in the half-dark, is also to call the lost forward.” ~ Gregory Maguire
“Out of our need we patronize our artists, we flirt with our poets, we petition our architects: Give us your lusty colorful world. Signal to us a state of being more richly steeped in purpose and satisfaction than our own. Thanks to our artists, we pretend well, living under canopies of painted clouds and painted gods, in halls of marble floors across which the sung Masses paint hope in deep impasti of echo. We make of the hollow world a fuller, messier, prettier place, but all our inventions can’t create the one thing we require: to deserve any fond attention we might accidentally receive, to receive any fond attention we don’t in the course of things deserve. We are never enough to ourselves because we can never be enough to another. Any one of us walks into any room and reminds its occupant that we are not the one they most want to see. We are never the one. We are never enough.” – Gregory Maguire, ‘Mirror Mirror’
“The human mind – we have come to observe – tricks out distinctions in principles of opposition. A man more foul will likely be less benign. A woman with a greedy belly may also be mean with her widow’s mite. The way a man slakes his thirst and a woman slakes her thirst are not identical, for they thirst for different things.
Perhaps that is why humans rely on the mirror, to get beyond the simple me-you, handsome-hideous, menacing-merciful. In a mirror, humans see that the other one is also them: the two are the same, one one. The menace accompanies the mercy. The transcendent cohabits with the corrupt. What stirring lives humans have managed to live, knowing this of themselves! And so we had made a mirror, and in our foolishness lost it, and the one who set out to reclaim it had never returned.” ~ Gregory Maguire, ‘Mirror Mirror’
“Yet the world was a spectacle, its own old argument for itself. Endlessly expounded with every new articulation of leaf and limb, laugh and lamb, loaf and loam. Surely there was something in the world lovely enough to counter the dread of being alone, a solitary figure untroubled by ambition, unfettered by talent, uncertain of a damn thing?…
The colossal might of wickedness, he thought: how we love to locate it massively elsewhere. But so much of it comes down to what each one of us does between breakfast and bedtime.” ~ Gregory Maguire, ‘Son of a Witch’
Sweet blessed day after Christmas, how grateful I am that you have arrived with my sanity somewhat still intact! Of course, we have merely landed in that strange purgatory that leads through New Year’s Day, but the biggest day is over, and I feel no shame in rushing quickly through the rest of it. My daily meditations have fallen by the wayside the past few weeks, which is strange as this is when I need them more than over. I’ll begin again soon, because I miss them, and they provide a calmer baseline that would have been especially helpful these past few weeks. Luckily, my healthier survival mechanisms saw me through, as did a few friends, and always Andy. He has his own difficulties during the holiday season, so when he made me an omelette on Christmas Day it was one of the sweetest offerings I’ve had this season.
Now onto the year-end recaps and all that nonsense, even if I don’t know anyone who wants to look back on this year at all. Maybe I’ll skip the year-end recap entirely – or just truncate it to a one parter. Some years are best left forgotten.
It seems that there are those who took this post to heart, and a few have already thanked me for it, so in that spirit of Christmas counter-programming, here is a little list of links that have absolutely nothing to do with Christmas. Most are gratuitous summer posts, and a few are just random nonsense to pass the rest of the day. Get your merry on, get your freak on, get your Boxing Day paraphernalia ready! Dukes up…
This is a bit of an odd Christmas message. It goes out to all of you who may be be scrolling through your phones trying to escape your family or circumstances, holed up in a childhood bedroom or vainly trying to disappear into the corner of a couch while passers-by fail at being surreptitious in glancing at your screen. Maybe you’re at an endless Christmas dinner table, where half the people have already brought out their phones instead of engaging in conversation and you’re trying to look like you have concerns of greater import as well.
For a lot of us, Christmas is just another minefield of social anxiety-prone situations, of dealing with difficult family dynamics, and ignoring the grievances that have piled up throughout the years. We build it up to be this year-ending finale of joy and wonderment, a moment that suddenly erases all wounds, and the hype and hoopla rarely translates into anything that meets expectations.
For those of you waking up to the emptiness that Christmas sometimes becomes, this post is for you. It won’t solve any of those issues, it won’t change your mindset or dramatically alter your mood – it exists simply to give you a friendly nod, to let you know you’re not alone, and that this day doesn’t have to be what humankind has led you to believe it should be. There are lessons in the Christmas story that are timeless and pertinent, and they are so trite and basic that if you need a reminder of them you probably aren’t living a life of basic decency and goodness anyway. (I also find that those who espouse such religious virtuosity seem to forget those very lessons when it comes to forgiveness or immigrants or homeless people.)
It’s a reminder that though you may momentarily feel like a misfit, in whatever situation you find yourself, this is merely a day – one of many days in a year, and a lifetime – and it need not carry any more weight than what we give it. It’s a reminder that you are not alone, no matter how isolated you might feel, whether in a sea of family and friends or in an apartment by yourself, because we all feel alone at times. And sometimes the loneliest people are those who are surrounded by others all the time, because if you don’t know what it’s like to ever be alone, how can you truly appreciate the company of others?
My plan for the day is to appreciate the moments of stillness and quiet, and carve out a few for myself if they don’t magically appear. I wish you a very Merry Christmas, and a happiness and contentment that goes beyond this finite season.
My friend Chris is one of those enviable people who try to make the most of every moment, packing in action and events into every single hour of living. He’s the guy who books his flights at the last hour possible in order to extend the weekend for its full duration. I’m the opposite – I prefer to hear out early to get home and get back in the head-space of the daily grind so as to allow some decompression time. There are merits to both, but on this Sunday following our Boston Children’s Holiday Hour, I decided to give Chris’s way half a chance. When he mentioned he had never been to the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum, I went against all my Virgo grain and decided to join him on an impromptu Sunday morning jaunt to one of my favorite places in Boston.
My usual time to visit the Gardner is deeper into the winter, when I’m starting to feel the despondency of the season really start to drag us down. Maybe we’re already in such despondent waters, as I felt the pull of needing to be around beauty and warmth and greenery. Orchids against a snowy backdrop will always remind me of the magic that is humanity.
This is the original birthplace of my love-affair with tree ferns, where a quartet of them anchors the central garden courtyard. Scarlet accents of poinsettias, amaryllis, and flowering maples provided a new view for me (I don’t recall ever visiting during the holidays – shame on me for such negligence).
Something was producing an exquisite perfume, but I never could determine its origin – one of those beautiful mysteries that will have to remain unsolved for now.
With the chaotic conundrum that is Christmas buzzing in the city around us, this sacred bit of tranquility and calm, charm and verdant beauty, provided a respite and relief. Shared with a friend, it came with a solemnity that hinted at the real meaning of Christmas.
Chris and I, both approaching our mid-century mark next year, found ourselves contemplative and still able to laugh at life. Our concerns are wildly different from what they were a quarter of a century ago, when a weekend in Boston meant drinking, partying, and losing mornings and often days – absolutely no regrets, for then or for now.
When our time at the Gardner was done, Chris went on to Harvard, I was back on the dreaded Mass Turnpike, and somehow Christmas was back in my heart.
One of my favorite Christmas traditions for the past seven or eight (?) years has been the cumbersomely-named Boston Children’s Holiday Hour. It was originally scheduled as a quick one-off gathering when a few of us found ourselves in Boston on the weekend or two before Christmas. I opened up the condo for an afternoon “hour” of hot cocoa as people were winding around the city on their holiday touring. That original hour turned into several, and we ended up ordering dinner in and making night of it.
Since then, we’ve managed to make some assemblage of friends and family throughout the years, and now that we’ve reached 2024, most of these ‘children’ are teenagers and young adults. That doesn’t mean they aren’t still someone’s child, or that we need to change the premise at all. Some years simply make us work harder for it, such as this one, which found me stuck on the Mass Turnpike as a poorly-predicted snowstorm made driving hazardous.
A major accident involving trucks and multiple vehicles occurred just before I reached Worcester, shutting down that section of the Mass Turnpike. In all these years of driving to Boston, I’ve never once driven there any other way than on that turnpike, but suddenly we were all being re-routed off I-90. A holiday stranglehold of traffic ensued, which found us standing still for about an hour as snow piled up around the cars. I contemplated the empty bottle of Vitamin Water as a urinal should things come to that point. Eventually, things moved a bit, and after a five-and-a-half hour drive (which normally takes me two-and-a-half) I arrived in Boston, where the snowy scene was almost enough to make up for the ordeal. Almost.
Braddock Park is magical after a snowfall, and this was one of the first holiday gatherings that had a backdrop perfectly designed for the cozy theme at hand. Chris was arriving that first night by train, and he sent me a picture of an iced-out train door straight out of the Polar Express. I looked out at the street below and watched as the light changed from hour to hour. The wind passed over us, allowing the snow to settle and stay on the tree branches.
The next morning dawned with skies of blue and sunlight to show off nature’s wonder. The day of our children’s holiday hour had arrived again, with family contingents from Suzie and Kristen due to arrive that afternoon.
Chris and I headed out for a brunch at Metropolis and some last-minute shopping, and an impromptu holiday stroll of our own, where we happened upon some free Levain cookies at a luggage store – that alone made the chilly walk worth it.
I headed back to the condo while Chris finished up his shopping excursion, pausing to take in this glorious sunny scene from the Southwest Corridor Park. Winter has its enchantments.
Our cozy Christmas gathering was at hand, and I got to meet George and Ruby, enlarging our happy circle. Just a few days before Christmas, I finally felt a twinge of Christmas spirit – or maybe it was just the love of lifelong friends, and is there all that much of a difference? Both are healing, both are soul-enriching, both fill the heart with warmth powerful enough to see us through the rest of the winter.
This little family of friends, ensconced in a little pied-à-terre in one of my favorite cities, has become the saving grace of my Christmas season, always managing to turn around whatever bah-humbug mood or real family strife that may be waiting for me in my hometown. The night closed around us, but the festivities were not quite finished for the weekend…
Christmas cookies make for an acceptable breakfast for the entire week in which Christmas falls. I said what I said. (Holiday shout-out to Marline who has been graciously filling a ‘Cookies for Santa‘ tray with delicious treats for kitty for almost two decades.)
