The Chronicles Of Jessica

This is our first Christmas as a married couple and things are a little slapdash due to the fact that we just moved into this new apartment, along with the inconvenience of Paul's job sucking up all of his life force and the folly of the 25th falling on a Tuesday. Tuesday isn't a good day to have Christmas. If you have it on a Friday that works well because you can take a long weekend or if it falls on the weekend then people who might have to normally work would maybe have it off, but Tuesday is just...it's not working for me. I want to lodge a formal complaint but I'm not sure where to mail it.

Anyway, we can't get to New Jersey or to Maine to see our families, which I thought might be sort of sad, but then we found out our friends James and Christine are going to be here in DC too so we invited them over for Christmas dinner. Christine is a pastry chef, people. (She made our wedding cake.) I have a pastry chef coming over for dinner. I may not even bother fixing real food so we can make sure there's adequate room for dessert. I'll just serve some triscuits and water and then we can get down to business.

But since we couldn't go to them, our families did the most amazing thing: They sent Christmas to us via UPS. Over the past week we've received the most beautifully wrapped gifts and cards. My Auntie Jan and my Auntie Kathy actually sent boxes a few weeks ago filled with things especially for our Christmas tree. I probably wouldn't have even bothered putting up a tree if they hadn't done that for us; it was really so thoughtful. So today I went over to the garden store and bought one of the robust little table-top trees they still had left and I brought it home and spent the day arranging all these ornaments on it and arranging all the beautiful gifts beneath it. Some of the ornaments were ones I remember from Christmases in Maine when I was a little girl, like a moose made out of a clothespin with little pipe cleaner antlers. I used to love the tree at my grandmother's house; we didn't always have a tree at my mother's house since we traveled every year. And the trees you get in Maine are always so...Christmasy, somehow. Everything in Maine is more Christmasy really. Memere and Pepere used to have these two glazed gingerbread ornaments in the shape of rocking horses for me and my cousin, one said "Jessica" and one said "Tonya". I loved having an ornament on the tree with my name on it. I used to sneak in there when no one was looking and move it to a more prominent position in front and stick Tonya's off toward the back where you couldn't see it that well. Hey - I stopped doing it, like, three years ago.

So thank you family! You've made our holiday so, so special. We love you and we'll be thinking of you while we lay on the couch with the buttons on our pants undone, in the grand tradition of Christmases everywhere.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone!!!