The red arrow on the dial of the Holiday Atmospher-o-Meter trembled and lifted at last into the green “go!” zone at 6:30 p.m. on Monday night. My niece Evvy and I pressed the last gumdrop onto the rooftop of one of those store-bought gingerbread houses from a kit; we dripped royal icing from its eaves like icicles, threw sparkly colored sugar at it for snowy shimmer, and it was done. The household had achieved the requisite level of Christmassy-ness, with the correct proportions of candies in cut-glass dishes, string lights and candlesticks, ornaments (dangling on the tree in tutti-fruity colors and at least one crushed underfoot in the music room), ivy, box, and bough.
As with so many things in life as the years tick-tick-tick by (the self-observation of aging, like waiting for a bomb to go off, tick-tick-tick), it takes rather more priming of the pump than it used to to achieve the right holiday atmosphere. Rather more effort to get into the spirit of magic and anticipation.
Last night I lay awake in bed until nearly 3 a.m., wondering if the presence of small children is what’s required to bring on the Christmas mood more effortlessly. I decided no, I don’t think small children should be necessary. I can remember feeling plenty Christmassy 20 years ago as I wandered the Century 21 department store in December as a childless fashion-magazine editor in high heels, among the gift-boxed leather gloves and Dearfoam slippers. When I was younger, all it took for me to feel that old Christmas magic in my heart was a shop window with a mechanical Santa checking his naughty/nice list and the mention of the words “lessons and carols” on NPR.
Evvy and I sang both “The Heat Miser Song” and “The Snow Miser Song” (“He’s Mr. White Christmas, he’s Mr. Snow! He’s Mr. Icicle, he’s Mr. Ten Below!”) from the Rankin and Bass animated masterpiece “The Year Without a Santa Claus” while decorating the gingerbread house. Maybe that is what finally moved the dial on the Atmospher-o-Meter.
Faithful readers, who know me to be an awful snob — the phrase “monster of intolerance” comes to mind — in the kitchen, may wonder how factory-made supermarket gingerbread came into the house. My son was given the kit, in a big red box, to bring home from school on Monday afternoon, having missed a gingerbread house activity in his seventh-grade class on Monday morning because he and I were tardy in returning from a two-day holiday hooky trip to the city.
It was just Teddy and me on this year’s December tourist visit to midtown Manhattan. For the previous eight Decembers, all three of us — Teddy and his big sister and I — had made an annual tradition of it, staying overnight in a hotel, having breakfast with Santa at Macy’s, walking through the Plaza Hotel. Nettie isn’t getting home from boarding school, though, until Wednesday night, and we’ve run out of weekends before Christmas, so it was just mother and son. He’s recently turned 13. I’m not sure how many more Manhattan holiday weekends we have in front of us.
We didn’t see the Rockettes kick up their legs and, come to think of it, saw only one Santa ringing his bell. On Sunday, Teddy and I drove straight to 116th Street in Harlem so he could get a proper haircut at Shabazz Your Modern Barber Salon, a traditional barbershop in a storefront below the onion-domed mosque on the corner of Lenox Avenue where Malcolm X preached in the early 1960s. Then we ate Teddy’s favorite — eggs Benedict with smoked salmon — and watched the World Cup final — at an excellent restaurant up Lenox called Barawine where customers were shouting encouragement in French but cheering for Argentina. Then we drove down to Bryant Park and I went ice-skating for the very final time, ever, in my life.
The last time I went ice-skating, before this weekend, I got a concussion. That was back in Canada, at the ice rink that the Bluenoses called “the arena,” where my kids learned to skate under the tutelage of Nova Scotian volunteer moms, fully padded from ankle to chin in thick toddler snowsuits. In December of 2013, at a “public skate,” I enthusiastically laced up my old pair and tore out onto the ice in high spirits. I’d always been a decent skater, able to turn figure-eights and spin around and around with my arms out. But on that fateful day, my feet flew out from under me and my head flew back toward the hard ice and — as I flew down — I realized that my center of gravity had shifted upward. I don’t mean that figuratively, but literally: My body weight had redistributed itself, and ice-skating had become perilous.
The body betrays us.
I used to love ice-skating regardless of the inevitable cramp in the feet from the stiff, old-fashioned white ladies’ skates we wore. I learned on the ponds of the East End in the 1970s, when Town Pond reliably froze each winter and we went ice-boating, too, on Mecox or Hook Pond. I especially loved the small-town ritual of taking my ice skates to be sharpened in the back of the Tillinghast hardware store on Newtown Lane, even well into the 1990s. I had no fear and could travel quite fast on ice and, for some reason, could skate even faster backward than forward, in a jazzy serpentine.
Well, I do not recommend the ice rink at Bryant Park in Manhattan. It’s, as they say, a bit of a rip.
I don’t understand, demographically speaking, how it comes to pass that so many millions of tourists are crammed so tightly into midtown Manhattan during the December shopping season. (Why are there so many more tourists than there were 10 or 20 years ago? Literally, how? Why? What is this population shift?) On the sidewalks outside of Saks Fifth Avenue, and upon the famous take-a-selfie red staircase of Times Square, and amid the rows of cocoa and waffle stalls at Columbus Circle — you cannot move for the crowds.
Teddy and I waited on one line to show our tickets for entry to the Bryant Park ice rink; we waited on another line to rent our skates; we waited on another line to check our shoes; we waited on another line to actually get out onto the ice; we were about to skate at last when, getting to the front of that fourth line, I was turned back by a very grouchy elf because my microscopically small handbag was deemed too large to be worn during skating, and I had to wait on a fifth line to check it. Back on line four (now the sixth line), I stepped onto the ice and immediately realized I was likely to break a wrist.
Teddy is a teenager now, a lanky figure wearing black on the ice, no longer small, no longer made rotund by an over-padded snowsuit, but despite being a teenager still has a hard time suppressing the smile that has always lighted up his dear face. He skated around and around a few times, alone — below a beautiful, pink Manhattan sunset, the glorious public library to the east, the skyscrapers to the south — while I slid alternate feet three or four times tentatively and seized the railing. I turned around and skated backward to the rink exit. I was off the ice within four minutes.
That night, we watched “It’s a Wonderful Life” on the big screen at the AMC Empire 25 on 42nd Street. An old friend from Budapest fell asleep during the movie, next to us, and snored loudly while Jimmy Stewart danced the Charleston with his high school sweetheart, Mary. The snoring only made it more cozy. The red arrow on the Atmospher-o-Meter lifted two notches. Teddy is still young enough to have put a pair of Santa Shark Slides (ridiculous red slippers with green glow-in-the-dark shark teeth over the toes and a Santa hat over the arch) at the top of his wish list.
The Christmas cake is in its tin, soaking up the rum. The older I get — the more the balance of body weight shifts and the farther my children travel from me — the more I prefer the ancient, British sort of Christmas carols that speak about the winter landscape, the bare trees, the holly that bears a berry, the hard ground. The beauty of this season is certainly spare. I think you need that: You need the bleak midwinter feeling, the silence, in order to fully appreciate the warmth of the hearth and of the good cheer of the candlelight. It’s harder to see the spareness, sometimes, these days.