Angels and Others

I’m a Christmas person.  So I surprised myself a little a few days ago when my partner husband Jeffrey asked, “What about Christmas do you like so much? ”and I couldn’t really come up with an answer. Jeffrey is not a Christmas person and in an effort to make our mixed marriage work I thought that I should come up with an answer.  This question isn't unusual when you consider that I don’t believe that the series of events the holiday is meant to commemorate actually took place, or if they did, it was not in the way I was taught in a Sunday school classroom at Fox Hill Central United Methodist Church.  It was while I was trying to find an answer to this question that I had something of an epiphany, a secular epiphany but an epiphany nonetheless: my love of all things Christmas has very little to do with the New Testament and a great deal to do with A Christmas Carol .  It’s not the Gospel writers (whoever they may be) and the story they tell that fills me with j...

Well the holiday food onslaught has begun.Right now in my office there are no less than five kinds of festive snack treats. No one seem s to know exactly where they come from, they just appear in the break room in the morning waiting to be eaten. While I’m not much given conspiracy theories I have entertained the thought that the snacks are delivered overnight by malicious imps fired by Santa and now in the employ of an underworld cabal made up of the owners of gyms and weight management systems. Does anybody even know what Jenny Craig looks like? A more plausible (but far less interesting) theory is that my co-workers have brought these sugary treasures to the office motivated less by the holiday sprit (although I’m sure that plays some part) and more by the desire to have them out of the house. Now I’m sure that the covert purveyors of these things both sweet and savory believe that they are spreading holiday cheer and no doubt they are. To those of us wh...

Thanksgiving Day (or as it was known in our house, The Day When Mommy Cries) is now upon us and you either have or soon will eat a meal certain to equal or surpass the annual nutritional intake of a good sized Bengali village. I have not returned to my ancestral lands for today’s annual celebration of all things caloric but instead will be spending the day with husband and a good sized group of extended family and scatterings here in LA . It was during a discussion of this ad hoc gathering that I came to realize that while the components of the traditional Thanksgiving meal are fairly standard, turkey, stuffing (or “ dressing” if your dad wore a tie to work), sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce and the obligatory vegetables, the composition of said components varies greatly and opinions regarding this composition occupy a space in the holder’s heart somewhere between religious belief and the love of a first born child. While strong opinion abounds concerning almost every aspect...