A Glorious Christmas

Once we could see that the reindeer had eaten the carrots and Santa had drunk the milk and polished off the cookies...

and that there was a present with never-before-seen gift wrap addressed to the youngest member of the family...

...it was time to get cracking on the rest of the presents.

The previous night, Christmas Eve, everyone had bundled up and gone into Manhattan to look at the decorated windows...

(JJJ: I know you remember:

""On the No Parking signs

There are icicles in lines

And the streets are deserted, everybody's home...

And in Bonwit's and Gimbel's

The decorated windows

Are shining like multicolored metronomes...")

There were hundreds and hundreds of people on the streets (the line to get into the Starbucks in the Trump Tower was fifty people long). The famous windows at Bergdorf and Goodman's, the chestnuts roasting on an...er, propane burner, the suspended electrified snowflakes hanging over Fifth Avenue, the lit up tree inside the Plaza Hotel -- the only word that comes close to describing it all is "magic."

Last night -- Christmas night -- The Great Dance-Nik came over along with friends from in town and out of town. The hideous end of the Shmlaker game was watched with expected horror. Dinner was spectacular-- there was crazy-good pot roast and celery root remoulade and cole slaw, plus fresh seared tuna and Farahnaz's mango salad and orange-black olive salad, and delicata squash, plus apple and pecan pie and Chef Pickle's persimmon pudding which made a successful cross-country journey. And music -- Isabella playing congas, of course.

In the end, for whatever it's worth, it is just more Christmas-y in the East than in the West. We've got Halloween. They've got Christmas. That's just the way it is. But the key is being around people you love.