Happy Holidays from 14th Street to NYC

I'm in New York celebrating the holidays with my family - fun, lots of laughs, but it seems like it took a little longer this year for everyone to unwind and get to that place where we're all sitting in the living room, sprawled on couches or across the floor in front of the tree telling stories and jokes (usually about each other in fits that has the victim in question laughing hysterically)
...there's some tension in the air generally. It's probably our last Christmas in the house in which we all grew up and although that's a good financial decision and the best thing for my parents to do, it's still sad. Then there's the inevitable fact that people are getting older...like my grandfather, who lives with my parents and just wanders around the house from television set to set, or my great-aunt Helen, who has Alzheimer's and spent 15 minutes at the end of the night loudly insisting that this wasn't her coat, it didn't fit and her coat was longer and she hated this coat and why would she wear someone else's coat home anyway? which was hard to see. And the crowd, while always fun, was just subdued this year.

At the end of the night we put on DVDs of past Christmases, when 25 people would invade the house on Christmas Eve, the whole extended family and tons of cousins and everyone had hair and my grandmother was still alive, sitting at the kitchen table running things, and I think it made things worse, brought home the fact that things change and kids grow up, and there are family members who were in those videos who are now dead, or not speaking to each other, or dying slowly in nursing homes before their time, cousins who have made bad marriages or bad investments and are stuck, and the crowd has gotten smaller every year since, and next year we'll be in some condo somewhere--or worse, in a restaurant--and all those ghosts sitting beside us in the living room won't follow us to a shiny new condo with no memories.

On the bright side I baked up a storm, trying my hand at black and white cookies and a lemon cake I made from scratch. They came out great - that's what happens when you have all ingredients you can possibly think of at your disposal and don't have to improvise, plus the real-deal baking equipment and an oven that cooks evenly. I'll post pictures of the goodies one of these days.

Tomorrow we go to my brother's apartment in the city for cocktails and dinner and poor Bub who has been working all night will try and pull through and stay up to meet us. He's fixing someone's collapsed lung right now at 2AM and I'm over here feeling sorry for all the times that have already happened and I was lucky enough to witness. How silly of me. Merry Christmas, everyone.