The Christmas card from strangers
This December week, I received precisely one dozen Christmas cards.
It’s not the flavor of odd holiday foods we crave, but the taste of home
Foods like fruitcakes, pig’s jowls, and lutefisk are all but unpalatable, but we keep making them, year after year.
Hallmark movies: An antidote for a male-centered world?
Romances validate what women bring to the table.
Dating ethnic foods for Christmas
Our family of six sisters had a tradition as we dated in high school and college. If you brought a boy home for Christmas Eve dinner, you had to force him to bring along a traditional dish representing his ethnic heritage. This was how we learned to embrace exotically diverse non-Scandinavians, not to mention expand […]
A bad gifter
I give bad gifts. Size 5 shoes to size 11 feet. Yogurt makers to the lactose intolerant. Diaries to the discreet. Sheet music to the relentlessly tone deaf. It’s not that I am thoughtless—I’m thinking, I’m thinking, believe me. It’s just that I have this holiday weakness of idealizing my friends and family, sometimes to […]
Baking for nobody
I just baked 12 dozen Christmas cookies for no one. I do the baking every year; the “no one” part I’m still getting used to. When I ran a magazine, I’d make a batch of these each December week and bring them in on Mondays for the staff. A junior editor who became a senior […]