Christmas Stories
Collected Agenda #24
WHAT I DID
Monday
I wake up early - the light is gray but brilliant and it hits me like a beam. Shivers up my spine. We don't have curtains. I don't miss a thing. It's the type of cloud cover that you might love to fly through. In a plane, you might break through one crisp layer of fog over the city and then there would be nothing but sun. I want to watch all that gray severe light filter through the windows while I run in slow motion in my otherwise sterile, open, empty-beside-for-me luxury Soho gym. The city has emptied out. Me next. My whole day is free. I have until eight pm. It's luxurious, though maybe not entirely rare. It will be soon. Rare, I mean.
The end of the year approaches. There is something terribly wrong with this train to Boston. I could reflect on everything I did this year if I wanted to, but the significant parts feel singular in a way that I imagine as too sacred to attempt to describe. Fall in love. Retreat away from routine and find replacement in whispy days in an endlessly bright apartment. It’s been the closest thing to bohemia I will ever have again - which is something that one actually probably should not seek, but which one puts on a childlike pedestal nonetheless.
I intend to qualify nothing. This is always my intention, but sometimes I follow my own rules more closely than others. Do you feel self satisfied when you say that one year changed everything? I would, which is why I’m not going to say it.
The train to Boston is late, and then I later learn, cursed. Stopped at New Haven, pulling out of the station, there's a loud thump on my window and then I see a young woman staggering back along the platform. She gears herself up and then hurdles at the train again, slamming her body into another window a few seats down, but now the train is beginning to pick up speed. She starts sobbing as it leaves the station. Her bags are by her side. David is getting whisky and hotdogs at the dining car, but I tell him when he returns. I think you're hallucinating again, he says. Again being the pivotal word, because he suggested I was hallucinating when I saw a jaguarundi in the back garden of an urban hotel in San Salvador, too. The other passengers seem unfazed. Almost inhumanly so. And so, of course, I also wonder if the oddities might be a simple trick of the mind.
The train stops again later on. They lost their crew, someone says on the loudspeaker. They will start the train again when they can, but as of now, there is no one to start the train, what with the missing crew and all. There are footsteps running up and down the car halls but I'm in the inner seat and I can't see anything. There are shadowy figures sprinting on the platform. I wonder if we should get off - are train robberies still a thing? - but then we're moving again and then we're in Boston, the oddities unexplained, the hex apparently dissipating in the car ride to the country.
Snow and clear skies, here. It’s amazing how quickly the platform in suburbia can fade into a sense that you are the only ones around for hours. Moon over the fields. Pesto pasta for dinner reheated. Far from the backroom haze of a train ride where something was amiss.
Tuesday
On Christmas Eve Day, we drive to town. Happy Christmas Eve, I tell David. David tells me that he doesn’t consider Christmas Eve to begin before evening. As a matter of semantics, I can’t disagree. It’s a bright morning. Piercing. There’s snow over the fields and I drive slowly round the bends. I prefer when people say happy Christmas to merry, I tell David, and he wrinkles his nose. That's the traditional way, I say. That's the very British way. I'm not being didactic, I'm just being a snob. In the rendition of “A Night Before Christmas” that we read in the evening - there are a few copies around the house but I like the 1870 illustrated paperback copies best - they say Happy Christmas To All. I can't remember all the lines, but I do remember this one.
David wants to know if the pond we like to swim in will be frozen. The little ponds are, but the big one - Walden - isn't. I drive faster the further I get from home. You can see the surface churning even from the road. Ripples in gray black water. The surface is moved by wind, not yet stabilized by cold.
Christmas Eve Dinner is my favorite meal of the year, but David convinces me to stop at the alcove at Main Street Cafe around three pm. It's like a diner but cozier, he says. The alcove is tucked away down a driveway, near a parking lot, the real restaurant faces the street and it's decked in pine wreaths and dried chains of cranberry and orange. Upstairs, it's bustling. There's a long wait by the pastry shelf. To bring you your food here, in the alcove, the waiter comes outside, walks down the driveway, the door bursts open, we're the only ones left inside. Sitting at the hidden little bar, David convinces me to share corn clam chowder and onion rings - fantastic but now I'm full.
I still eat at dinner later. Roast duck and roast goose and cranberry sauce and pie. It feels sweet, and not gluttonous. The season doesn’t feel gluttonous this year. I used to be so averse to this sin - gluttony, that is. Overindulgence hasn’t crossed my mind too much these past few weeks, I suppose a natural conclusion if you believe overdoing it to be a product of self destruction, and not pleasure.
This year, I can access Christmas in a way that I can’t recall experiencing similarly since childhood. I like when winter is visceral. A visceral winter is my favorite season. I would like to feel the cold in my bones this year. I would like to feel nostalgia in bursts that are sharp when I walk around certain corners at dusk. I get everything I would like this year. It doesn’t unsettle me. It just means my memories are more precise.
It’s a strange thing, to come back into yourself that is.
Thursday
We sleep til ten, light candles on the Christmas tree, polar swim in Walden Pond. Breakfast is maple butter on toast. Linner is cranberry moscow mules and cocktail shrimp.
Later - an icy woods behind the house. The boardwalk over the swamp is caked with snow. I can see Saturn in the sky, even in the early afternoon. There's a Christmas Tree in the woods; a pine strung with ornaments, red and green ornaments, no lights because it's too deep in the forest to power them. We only see one other group on our walk; a family pulling a child in a snowsuit on a sled.
Old friends come over for Christmas. You wonder, with these things, if there will still be things to say but then it seems, there always is. I feel grateful to have grown up in the presence of characters. People whose aesthetic and ethical sensibilities remain solid and unique and admirable. We have lasagna and salad by the fire and then pie made from a special type of sweet squash with homemade sweet cream. My mom is telling a story about the sheep farmer across the street and the fist fight she got into at the town swap exchange (the scavenging table at the dump) that got the whole operation shut down for years. The swap exchange was getting out of hand. My mother was being solicited for two hundred dollars in the parking lot to relinquish the neighbor's china that she'd spotted abandoned only five minutes before. The swap exchange was a nice thing though, environmentally friendly. You wouldn't believe the age of the women throwing hands over discarded silver.
The dinner table conversation turns to strength of heart. "She has a good heart, they are saying, re the elderly women prone to physical blows over perfectly good silver. “She has a good heart but she has common sense too, and if you are not doing the common sense thing, then she will not withhold harshness.”
My parents and their friends are shrugging. Sensibility does come with age. I've been learning this more lately. Level headedness when appropriate, too. Discretion when it comes to suffering fools, gladly or otherwise. We have many special items from the swap table around the house, and I used to find trinkets more of an inconvenience than a joy but I like the red table cloth with the little green and silver pine trees, the metal stars and chimes candle that spins and jingles when lit, the field of rocking horses always growing and dwindling by one or two but remaining a herd of sorts in my parents backyard. I can't stay here very long. The sense of interiority, quiet, the pale beauty of shifting light marking hours and time... it is lovely but it's also in conflict with my sensibility. This is symptomatic of some rot, likely. In another life I am endlessly entertained in the birch trees.
Going to bed, it’s been dark for a while now. Here, you see one star first every night. The sun has been setting in a special shade of pale blue this winter. It was dark out the windows by dinner time. You could still see the shadows in the fields.
Friday
I consider changing my train back to New York, staying here a bit longer, sinking into hazy dusks and evenings by the wood stove and the fires. There was a gas leak in the furnace and so now the gas is off. We've been using the wood stove and the fires a lot.
I don't change trains because it's too last minute. I'll become too suspended in time if I stay. There's a pink sunset over salt marshes in places like Mystic, Connecticut on the ride back to the city. I've been trying to work on the things I've put off for too long. I'm been trying to think about the way people talk about culture as I try to write a few reviews.
I wrote this sentiment before Christmas -- I know that there are things I'm supposed to be scandalized by, and I'm not really scandalized, but I also remain defensive - it's the worst of all worlds. I have the hearty puritanical roots of a New England Jewish Wasp. It's difficult for me. God it feels good to agree with whatever the person speaking is saying.
Now, the truth of it becomes -- morality as a simulacra is so dull. I can spend two seconds in real life and it hits me so starkly how much imitations of reality pale in its contrast. The diagnostics of the times suggests that the individual life becomes more and more disconnected from the collective life, your sphere of influence shrinks as the mirror world of technology gives you every reason to believe it grows, the word of the times isn't nihilism so much as absurdism. One symbol is easily swapped out for its opposite - they bear little material or spiritual significance. You know you don’t mean it.
After the terrible Bob Dylan biopic, we're driving on the highway towards the train station and my dad is asking me if there are examples of contemporary genius, what that would look like, and I'm saying that the thing is you have to make a concerted effort to even engage with art at all now, or sometimes to engage even with real life at all and it's an effort that goes against most of the forces in your day to day and so the thing is I think genius is unlikely, although there are contemporary artists I admire and genius implies some innate transcendency of the general malaise anyway, so maybe these issues are irrelevant in the face of genius.
A conversation at a coffee shop a few weeks ago - a younger man of the Monarchy school of thought is saying that an ideal society would not ask people to deal in the realm of public good and ruling provenance. Your sphere of influence is yourself and those around you, the best thing that can be done is we drop the illusion. An older man is saying but I've seen you be hugely influenced by the teachings of people you've never met. He's saying that now more than ever, we are living in an age that is cruel. I appreciate his point because - I appreciate learned wisdom and practicality only earned through time. And because, isn't it strange to say that now, more than ever, we live in real life?
Finding pure purpose in interiority- this is something that can be learned. It's not something I've learned yet, though.
WHAT YOU SHOULD DO
This week is prone to slip into oblivion of the sort where you won't really know what you did at all. There is not a ton going on in New York – it's hard to throw a party during a week that doesn't exist. But, you needn't become senselessly bored!
Sunday, December 29 From 7pm at KGB – Cassidy and Annabel present The Last Confessions of 2024
I didn't really watch any holiday films this year, and so I am taking the time to catch up now before it is too late. My favorite holiday film is The Shop Around The Corner - A blustery tale of missed connections in Budapest. The film is an adaptation of the 1937 play Parfumerie. The 1963 musical She Loves Me is an adaptation of the film. All renditions are wonderful, magical, instant classics
In sheer coincidence and in sheer representation of taste - my boyfriend bought my parents Toulouse-Lautrec The Art of Cooking for the holidays this year, and my sister bought me Toulouse-Lautrec’s Table. Both books teach you how to do wonderful things like throw a fabulous dinner party as an alcoholic, and roast entire boar heads on the spit outside your artist studio in France. It’s great reading, and some of the advice towards an artful table and an artful life is not too bad either.
I really loved my week at home as described above, and it reminded me how cozy New England can be. My three minute off the top of my head suggested itinerary for a similar week would include — stay at Concord's Colonial Inn; historical, quaint, gets the job done. Swim in Walden Pond if it’s half frozen. Get coffee at Haute Coffee, get breakfast at Main Streets Cafe, get lunch at Helen’s, get dinner at Woods Hole Table. I don’t have that much affection for Boston, but Cafe Vittoria in the North End is great for coffee and desserts and a pre/post dinner cocktail, and Mamma Maria in the North End is the best restaurant there. Good winter hikes (really more like walks) include Fruitlands, Drumlin Farm and the surrounding woods, and Walden Pond.
These descriptions ✨