Five seventh-grade boys on a sleepover, crashing around this old house on Boxing Day like so many puppies in a cardboard box. As far as quaint New England-y winter décor goes, we are well fixed here on Edwards Lane — we are so quaint and cheerful you wouldn’t be surprised if Mrs. Claus herself appeared in an apron bearing a flaming bowl of Charles Dickens’s favorite sugared brandy punch — but we are ill-equipped for sleepovers: no furnished basement, no wraparound modular couch, no Xbox, no Ping-Pong.
Teddy has resisted hosting sleepovers in the past, given our inadequacies, but now that he and his friends are old enough to go upstreet on their own, our old-fashioned sleepover inconvenience is compensated for by our proximity to town. They run to Herrick Park to shoot hoops. They run into Stop and Shop to buy bottles of hot sauce for a hot sauce-eating competition.
Our house also offers an excess of homemade fudge, nut brittle, and cookies. On the kitchen table, a three-level cookie tower (a transferware tea-time stand from the 1950s with snowbound scenes on it: a horse-drawn sleigh, a barn in moonlight, a girl with a muff) holds eight varieties of cookies baked in the ancient times, days ago, before Christmas. They need to be eaten tonight or they will go stale.
It was dark by 4:30 and I feel that the spare tire around my middle has expanded by two inches over the weekend. I’m nibbling on chocolate fudge with walnuts and writing my column in the kitchen, which is cold. I’ve just distributed cushions, sleeping bags, and eiderdowns onto the floor of the “music room” — by the foot of the Christmas tree — and thrown blankets and pillows onto the two couches and window seat. The windows are aglow with the light from plug-in fake candles that I bought a few weeks ago at the Bargain Box. They are tacky but I love them. We are on the fifth night of an extended festival of overindulgence.
On Thursday, I hosted a cookie exchange. Five ladies dropped by for tea and chitchat, coming away with five dozen apiece — cream-cheese cookies rolled in bright pink sugar, chocolate cookies sprinkled with crushed candy canes, biscotti with nuts and dried fruit, miniature mince pies, salted-caramel chocolate chips, confectioners-dusted snowballs . . .
On Friday, we had fondue night at my friend Alex’s house, consuming about two cups of wine-laced Emmental and Gruyere apiece. (Fondue the eve before Christmas Eve is a tradition in Alex’s family, but this year will stand out in memory as the Great Fondue Catastrophe of ‘22: The crockery pot over the Bunsen burner cracked open and the molten cheese seeped out, running through the slats in the dining table and onto the Persian rug below.)
Saturday afternoon, my houseguests and I put the finishing touches on the rum-sodden Christmas cake, whipping royal icing until it was stiff as meringue and positioning a menagerie of tiny, antique animal figurines atop the icing among a copse of bottle-brush pines. An elephant smoked a pipe in knee-deep snow beside a white horse. A ceramic dolphin leapt from a drift. Two ducks wore hats, a dog rode on a sled, and a camel — strayed far, far from a distant manger in the Levant — snuggled down on his knees into the blanket of white.
On Saturday night, Christmas Eve, we had feast number one, with duck breast and blackberry sauce, red cabbage, puréed parsnips, and Yorkshire pudding baked in the duck fat. On Sunday, we had feast number two, with duck breast again but green cabbage and apples this time.
I was woken up this morning, Boxing Day, at 4 a.m. by the silence in the house. The houseguests have gone. The furnace had paused in its ceaseless running, in the dark and cold of a 12-degree night. I got out from under the covers worried we had run out of fuel oil. I wandered the house and checked the radiators and, to economize, twisted to “off” the turn-knobs on the radiators in the playroom and guest room, which are empty now.
The sleepover boys, talking over one another excitedly, have just finished eating spoonfuls of hot sauce and bickering about who farted (“Who ripped one?” they shout). The clock has ticked past 10 p.m. I’m encouraging them to go outside and run through the South End Burying Ground under the thin moonlight. That’s exactly what the boys should be doing as the thin crescent moon waxes toward a new year.
But, I threaten the boys, there will be dire consequences if they so much as touch a toe to the ice of Town Pond. Do not go out on the ice, I warn. I will get in my car and drive each of them straight home if they even test the ice at its edge with a poking stick. (Before Town Pond was dredged, I’d have actively encouraged the boys to go out on the ice and slip and slide around in this dark night for a thrill. The pond never used to be more than knee-deep. But when the workmen were digging it out in the spring of 2021, I observed one of them standing with his boots in the muck at the bottom of the waterless pond and the pond's rim — the wood curb — was up by his ears.)
Teddy is represented on the Life360 app on my iPhone as a purple circle with the letter “T.” Life360 is a parenting device that shows the whereabouts of your children as they move through this world, on a clear satellite map. As the clock ticks toward 11, I monitor the purple “T” as my son and his friends move along James Lane, dawdle in the dark in the cemetery, run down the slope where the swans used to harass tourists . . . and then trot smack into the middle of the pond.
I call Teddy on his iPhone. As it rings, I watch the purple “T” move back toward the dry ground of James Lane. Teddy answers and denies everything. The app is wrong, he says. But, he says, a pair of older teenage boys are already sitting in lawn chairs at the center of the frozen pond, beside the blue Christmas tree.
The boys are running home in the dark right now — I can hear them dipping into the dark lawn behind the East Hampton Library, then making a circuit of the house — hooting and whooping. The thermometer outside my bedroom window reads 22 degrees.
I’ve just eaten my third brownie. I’m not making that up for effect. I ate three brownies tonight. The gingerbread house — superfluous as of today, defunct — is staring at me from across the kitchen. What do you do with a gingerbread house on Boxing Day? When the boys get home, I suggest that they ought to take it into the yard and ritually smash it with a hammer or boot. Make something of it. Give it some purpose, a second act.