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Tomorrow, I head to the east coast to celebrate the holiday season with all three of my children -- a huge rarity in my life, and something I will treasure. After years of elaborate cooking, I'll find myself as a guest at the table of my son Charlie and his sweetheart, Heather. No turkey; the meal will be vegetarian. After, we may read a play together (Heather suggested The Vagina Monologues, but my sons vetoed the plan). Or maybe we'll just wash the dishes and take a walk in Charlie's Brooklyn neighborhood, where -- if the weather's not too cold -- people still sit on stoops, and decorate their fire escapes with lights. My own early associations with Christmas were complicated, like those of most of us. In our family, the big problem had to do with my father's drinking, which was always worst in the month of December. (Add to that, my Jewish mother's lifelong yearning to be part of the holiday that had always left her feeling excluded. She celebrated, I sometimes say, "with a vengeance.") And so, all my life, I dreamed of a perfect Christmas, and I went to some pretty extreme lengths sometimes, trying to provide it for my own family. (One time I drove two hundred miles to pick up a ventriloquist's puppet for Willy. I scrounged up a dozen old down pillows, to sew my daughter a down comforter, not realizing -- until I laid it over her when I tucked her in, Christmas night -- that pillow down is pretty heavy. "This quilt reminds me," she said -- barely able to draw breath, under the weight of the thing -- "of those things they put on top of you at the dentist, when they take ex rays." Perfect presents. Perfect meal. Perfect family. You might as well try pitching a no-hitter, using a wiffle ball. A few years ago, when I was writing my novel The Usual Rules -- the story of a family for whom the appearance of a postcard-style Christmas is not an option -- I decided to write a scene in which the entire motley crew of characters in the novel (a lot of them, anyway) assemble, surprisingly, for Christmas dinner. The lineup here includes an unmarried teenage mother whose own mom has abandoned her, a lonely middle aged father of an autistic son, whose wife takes off every holiday season to an ashram, a runaway skateboarder, a woman who gave her son up for adoption thirty years earlier and recently reconnected with him only to discover he's a grimly judgemental Fundamentalist. Also at the table, my central character, a thirteen year old girl who recently lost her mother on September 11th -- now living with a father (late for the meal, as usual) whom she barely knows. I loved writing this scene. I loved imagining all of these characters coming together over a meal on a warm California day, and locating, around that table, something I'll call a state of grace. To me, this imperfect gathering represents the dream of a Christmas dinner that might actually be attainable -- where people make their own unlikely families, and open their doors to strangers, and discover kindness and compassion within themselves they may not have known they possessed. There's a little Nat King Cole in this one, and a stupid joke, and some bad pumpkin pie, and a first kiss. You may have read this chapter in the book, or on my website, but I thought I'd share a link to it with you here, in case you haven't, or would like to revisit this particular holiday scene of mine. CHAPTER TWENTY NINE from The Usual Rules, St. Martins' Press, 2003 With friendship,
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