Six Days of Christmas

There are toys for girls and boys

Silver bells make merry noise

Yet, you should remember from the start

Christmas is a feeling in your heart

Lucky little me got to celebrate Christmas all week this year. From Sunday, December 20th, to Saturday, December 26th, Christmas was the feeling in my heart.

My parents attended a seminar in Massachusetts last weekend and so they swung into the city for two nights afterward. They showed up at the tail-end of a Nor'Easter that dropped more snow on the city than I've seen living on the East Coast for three years, their arms loaded with brightly wrapped gifts, as if they themselves were Santa's elves. It was a very merry White Christmas indeed. Mike made a turkey with all the fixings and we spent Monday and Tuesday eating, visiting, opening presents and basking in Christmas delight.

[Insert photo of Christmas merriment]

[Photo not taken because I was too busy enjoying the merriment to pause and take photos.]

Wednesday I had to work and catch up on chores and pay attention to my responsibilities, but I did manage to squeeze in a couple of hours to bake my traditional mutilated ginger-people:

By the time you read this, I will have eaten the last of them.

Thursday we packed up the dogs and headed to Esopus, New York to spend the holidays with some friends in their beautiful cedar house in the forest. Christmas Day included a real wood-burning fire, softly falling snow, eight Alaskan Malamutes, a herd of deer, and freely-flowing wine.

Saturday morning it suddenly occurred to me that our Christmas week was over and I hadn't taken a single photo. No pictures of my parents opening presents, none of Mike's turkey or my lemon meringue pie. No photos of the Malamutes or the wild turkeys roaming the woods or the beautiful stag and his herd of does. No photos of the perfect snowfall Christmas night or the look on my face when I ate my first oyster (which was a look of pure bliss, if you'd like to know). And I don't mind, actually. Most of the time the memories in my head are much more beautiful than anything my camera captures. But we did snap this, or tried to anyway, next time we'll at least drink a cup of coffee before we attempt any self-portraits.


Here we are Saturday morning, our eyes still full of sleep. What looks like a snow-field behind us is actually an enormous fishing pond that is apparently one of the best places for bass fishing in New York state. In January and February you can go ice fishing here. I'm much more interested in ice skating, but at this point in the season that would be a very unsafe idea.

Merry Christmahanakwanzika to you and yours. I'm off to bed, warm, sleepy, and thinking all about New Years Eve. Which is in four days. What, what? FOUR DAYS. Have you thought about your new years resolutions yet? Because I have. And they're really good.