Christmas Eve is often more hectic than Christmas Day. There are last-minute gifts to buy, presents to wrap, ribbons to curl, food to prepare, and cookies to bake and leave out for Santa. For those who celebrate Christmas, I hope you can take a moment to just breathe, feel your heart beat, and be present with yourself and your gentlest thoughts of what brings you joy.
I clicked the random Holidailies prompt, and it was perfect: “Do you still live in the place where you grew up? How far away are you now, and why?”
I live about a six-hour drive from where I grew up, which was on Long Island. (ON Long Island. Never say “IN Long Island.” You’ll reveal yourself as one who has never set foot there and anyone who has ever lived there or in New York City will correct you on the spot.) On Long Island you had the rich kids on the North Shore and the cool kids on the South Shore and I’m proud to say that while I wasn’t rich, or even all that cool, I’m from the South Shore.
Long Island is known for a lot of things. It’s where a lot of people who work in Manhattan live. The beaches are gorgeous. If you like guys who are into cars you can take your pick. Then there’s wine country, the Hamptons, and Montauk. If you head out to the South Fork you will pass the Big Duck, which was originally built in 1931 by duck farmer Martin Maurer and used as a shop to sell ducks and duck eggs.
Image: Mike Peel
Here’s my Big Duck Christmas ornament, along with one of the ornaments from a set that used to be my parents’. I lived on Long Island for most of my 40s and got the Big Duck ornament when a friend came up to visit me and we went wine tasting.
No discussion of Long Island would be complete without mentioning the musicians who either hailed from there or decided to base themselves there, including Billy Joel, Pat Benatar, The Stray Cats, Steve Vai, Twisted Sister, Lou Reed, and Blue Oyster Cult.
In fact, LL Cool J was born in my hometown, Bay Shore. The town has several other claims to fame—it’s where you catch the ferry to Fire Island, it’s close to Robert Moses State Park and its beaches, it’s home to the Boulton Center for the Performing Arts (where I once saw Henry Rollins do spoken word)—but my favorite is that for nearly 100 years, the town was home to a huge Entenmann’s bakery.
Everyone loved Entenmann’s. There was nothing, but nothing, better than being there at just the right moment when the apple pies came off the line and were still warm in the box when you bought them. They would also have “dollar days” where you could get goodies that were getting close to their sell-by date or whose boxes were slightly wonky for only a buck. Entenmann’s cakes froze pretty well, so people would go in with shopping carts and go nuts with a twenty-dollar bill.
My favorite Entenmann’s cake was the chocolate with white icing with chocolate stripes and a single maraschino cherry on top. I think the chocolate might have been devil’s food, but then they introduced another goodie, a devil’s food cake with marshmallow icing and devil’s food crumbles on top. The banana cake was amazing, too. Then there were the chocolate glazed doughnuts with the chocolate crumbles on top that were also coated with powdered sugar just in case your pancreas My parents always had an Entenmann’s coffee crumb cake on reserve in case company came over, so Sebastian Maniscalco’s comedy routine about that is spot on.
Living so close to the bakery made waiting for the school bus more bearable. On days when the wind was just right, our part of town would smell like a warm blueberry muffin in the morning.
Why am I in northern Virginia? I went to college at George Washington University in D.C., fell in love with the city, and decided to stay in the area. Barring eight years back on the Island in my 40s that I still haven’t decided if I regret, and one year in Hawaii that I don’t regret but probably should, I’ve been in the D.C. area ever since.
And now for the tree from my home state, New York. I love the ornament with the pizza slice. There really is no pizza like New York pizza. It’s the dough and the Mafia tomatoes in the sauce.
New York’s state Christmas tree, 2023. Click to embiggen.
P.S. Don’t touch the crumb cake. It’s for company.
Finally Friday! And I’m absolutely wiped out, so I turned to Holidailies for a prompt. It said “Share your best advice for surviving the holiday season.”
My best advice is to learn how to say “no.” I think what stresses most folks out about the holidays is that they feel like they need to say “yes” to every invitation and every bit of crafting, decorating, and baking. This year I said yes to a few things, initiated plans, and put up a tree for the first time in 10 years, but after my salon visit tomorrow, it will most likely be “no” for the rest of the weekend.
Speaking of decorating, here is one of my most cherished ornaments, one from a set of four that my parents broke up to give to their four children. Each ornament was a different color—red, yellow, green, and blue—and we each got one in our favorite color, except for me. My favorite color is purple and there wasn’t a purple one. At first I felt a little left out, but then it occurred to me that yellow was my mother’s favorite color.
Yellow was my mother’s favorite color.
She was definitely an angel to me this year, what with the heart attack and all. I remember saying “I want my mother” at one point while the EMTs were working on me. If you’re in health care, you know that’s not a good sign: People often ask for their mothers when they’re about to die. And I did feel like I was about to die, enough so that I said as much to the EMTs, thanked them for trying to save me, and finally said “goodbye.” They told me they were going to lift me, and the next thing I knew, I was in the ICU trying to pull out a breathing tube.
These days, hospitals don’t keep you for long after a heart attack. Aside from insurance companies giving them a hard time about paying for more than a few days, it’s largely for a good reason because hospitals are not all that safe. There are all kinds of pathogens there and it’s easy to pick up a hospital-acquired infection. Still, I was pretty weak when I got home, not to mention sore and a bit anxious about being alone so soon after such a catastrophic event. What if I had another one? What if I died in my sleep?
But then I heard my mother’s voice, clear as a bell.
“It’s not your time.”
It was like she was sitting right next to me. I also felt my father’s presence there, and heard him say “No, sweetheart, it’s not.” Inigo was there, too, softly nudging me back from thoughts of my own mortality.
So far, so good.
And now for tonight’s state Christmas tree, New Jersey’s. This one is going out to two people, Andrew and Kathy. Andrew was my boss at Most Favorite Job, one of those rare gems of a manager who knows how to bring out the best in others and appreciates both the benefits and the necessity of downtime. To this day, he’s a dear friend and someone whose sage advice I always heed. There’s one line of his that stays with me when I’m in a chaotic situation, “Bend like the reed.”
I’ve known Kathy since the early 90s. We worked together at the job I had before I became a contractor at the USPS. If you’ve ever seen thirtysomething, she was the Eliot to my Michael, the creative graphic designer to my uptight writer. Yet we were cut from the same bolt in that neither one of us took it personally when the other said to do something. If she told me I needed to cut a few lines to make something fit, I’d cut a few lines. We’d sit together and try a few edits. “Try this phrase. No, that phrase. Perfect.” If I needed her to move something on a page, I’d tell her and she’d simply move it. And then we’d go for a beer after work. Kathy taught me the art of being calm, too: One of my favorite Christmas memories is of her sitting on the living-room floor of my then-apartment, patiently detangling lights for my tree.
Best part is, neither Andrew nor Kathy got mad when they told me they were from New Jersey and I asked “What exit?”
New Jersey’s state Christmas tree, 2023. Click to embiggen.
zenzalei 