It's Christmas time in the suburbs

It’s December 21 and it finally feels like Christmas, despite the dreadful and/or ridiculous events of this month. Last Thursday morning, someone asked me if I watched the President’s speech. Did I watch a crazy old man sundowning on live TV? Is that what you’re asking me? No. No I did not. And I won’t be watching the Patriot Games or the WWE fight on what remains of the White House lawn, and I absolutely won’t be calling it anything but the Kennedy Center, ever. I don’t even include the name “Reagan” when I mention National Airport, and that happened decades ago. 

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And now it’s December 23, or Christmas Adam because tomorrow is Christmas Eve and Adam came before Eve. The stupid renaming of the Kennedy Center is old news, supplanted by the even stupider news about a new class of battleships named after Trump. We’re five minutes from going to war with Venezuela and Denmark is threatening to detain our “Envoy to Greenland” as soon as he sets foot on that island. The stupidity persists, but so do I.

But enough of that. It’s Christmas now. I’ll be working on and off throughout the holidays, but on no particular schedule, and more off than on. 

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December 24, Christmas Eve. I have things to do, Christmas prep things, but apparently I am not doing them. I’m sitting here writing about having things to do. 

I think I finally understand why all of this is getting to me. It’s not because of the President and his henchmen and women. As bad as they are, I’d still feel hopeful if there seemed to be any possibility of any kind of consequence at all for any of them. I guess it could still happen, but they keep pushing the envelope of being absolute shit, and they still seem to have a vise grip on their supporters, including people I love but don’t want to see or talk to right now. People who used to know the difference between truth and lies, and who used to think that difference was important. That’s why it’s getting to me. As they say on social media, I hate this timeline. 

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That was fun, wasn’t it? Merry Christmas, ya filthy animals. Yes, it’s December 25. Cinnamon rolls and bacon are in the oven, the Christmas tree lights are sparkling, and all is calm and bright for now. It’s 8:30 and the rest of my family are sleeping but not for long. Several members of the family are spending part of Christmas Day at the Commanders game at what used to be known as FedEx Field. I don’t know what it’s called now, and I don’t care. I’ll call it whatever I want. I’ll call it Twitter Stadium. I’ll call it Kennedy Center Arena. I’ll call it Kamala Harris Field. Anyway, they’re all going to have to get out of bed soon so that we can open Christmas presents and eat cinnamon rolls and be the jolliest bunch of assholes this side of the nuthouse. It’s fine, they’re leaving the game early so we can have Christmas dinner. I thought for a moment about making my famous exploding turkey, but I decided to go with the traditional ham instead. 

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And it was a beautiful Christmas. A houseful of people whom I love opened presents and snacked on cookies and ate a lovely Christmas dinner and watched Christmas movies, surrounded by twinkly lights and pretty decorations. I made all of that happen, starting at 8 AM with bacon and eggs and cinnamon rolls and continuing on to about 9 PM with the last of the cleanup. Sometimes I worry that I’m too self-involved and solipsistic. And I am, I guess. But not on holidays. On holidays, I do everything for everyone, and then I watch everyone appreciate my work, and then I collapse a little bit, in a good way. I’m still tired, so today is a day of rest. A few more days, and we’ll have a new year. Not a moment too soon. 

If it's not documented...

It’s December 18, so not only is it almost time for Christmas, it’s time to start my new day planner. I love my little pocket day planner with its crisp white paper and gold leaf edged pages and world maps. I especially love the maps, which are absolutely useless for navigating but they're pretty. 

I usually track everything in my day planner. I have weekly to-do lists, a book list, a very unsophisticated spending and saving tracker, and almost daily records of small daily details. Except that recently, I haven't been tracking anything, so the last few  weeks of pages are pretty much empty. 

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I worked for a biotech company a long time ago. We manufactured diagnostic devices and reagents; and when I say “we," of course I mean the company and not me. But I also mean that we the company actually manufactured those things, right onsite. The company had about 400 employees in administration, operations, finance, sales and marketing, R&D, and manufacturing. Manufacturing and QA/QC were the biggest combined departments. This is apropos of nothing, except that it was only about 25 years ago, and the world has changed so much in that short time. I can’t imagine a company like this existing today. It was like working at a small paper company in Scranton.  I have so many stories about that job. One day, I’ll write them all down. 

Well, here’s one. The reagent manufacturing labs and manufacturing floor operated under what is called Good Laboratory Practices and Good Manufacturing Practices - GLP and GMP. These are official terms, which is why they are capitalized. And not being a scientist or a manufacturing engineer or a QA/QC professional, I’m not going to explain in any more detail except to say that the terms refer to a series of rules and procedures governing absolutely everything that happens in a GLP lab and a GMP manufacturing facility. Everything is written down, step by step - both before and after the fact. 

Our QA/QC director used to talk about accurate and complete documentation all the time. “If it’s not documented, it didn’t happen,” she would say. It was her catch phrase. She was so well known for that saying that it spread company-wide, and we said it about everything. 

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Wait, maybe this is why I’ve been lax with my planner - if I didn’t write 2025 down, then it didn’t happen. 

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What I like to say is that if it’s not documented, it won’t happen. I used to be the secretary for our kids’ summer swim team, and one of my responsibilities was to write the weekly email updates. In the first half of those updates, I would recap the most recent meets - because if it’s not documented, it didn’t happen. In the second half, I would let everyone know what was happening in the coming week: Spirit wear and suit order deadlines, Wednesday night B meet, Saturday morning A meet, Friday night pasta party, social events - summer swimming is a lot, and if it’s not documented, it won’t happen. Sometimes, I felt like I was writing things into being, as though the act of writing a thing out was what actually made that thing happen.

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I have two planner options for 2026: a Gallery Leather pocket size planner similar to the ones I’ve had for the past few years, or a very pretty Rifle Paper Company planner that my son gave me. The Gallery Leather has my beloved maps, and it also has a good number of extra pages for my additional notes and lists. I don’t love the color, though. I ordered what I thought was hot pink, but it turns out to be just pink, somewhere between bubble gum and carnation. The Rifle Paper one is prettier and it’s a gift from my son, but it’s an odd size and it only has five or six extra pages and no maps.  I have a week to decide between them. The recent documentation lapse is not the only thing that is making me feel unmoored, but it’s definitely a factor. The rest of this year is a wash, documentation-wise, but I’m going to start fresh in 2026. 

Photojournalism

When I was a  young person in the 1980s, I was a big fan of Tina Brown’s Vanity Fair. It was very glamorous and sophisticated, showing a world of beauty and luxury populated by brilliant and talented and interesting people. That world was mostly in New York, but VF also took us to London and LA and Paris and St. Bart’s and Aspen. I knew that I would never live in this rarefied world, but that was what made it so appealing. It was like reading fairy tales. I bought each new issue as soon as it hit the newsstand, and read it from the front of the front cover to the back of the back cover, including the masthead and the editor’s notes and the ads. 

It’s honestly been years - decades - since I’ve read Vanity Fair, but the entire internet was talking about the Susie Wiles interviews, and I had to read the article, so I subscribed. The subscription, a holiday special, was cheap:  $12 for a year, renewing at $36 a year. I’d have paid more than that just to read the Susie Wiles article and see Christopher Anderson’s incredible photos. 

The brilliant thing about this article (it’s really two articles; parts 1 and 2) is that it absolutely does not read as hostile or even especially critical of Wiles or even Trump. Chris Whipple just lets Susie Wiles speak for herself, and what she says is far worse than anyone could have written about her or her colleagues. Ms. Wiles comes across as polite and friendly and perfectly at ease with herself. She probably never thought for a single moment that she couldn’t charm a seasoned reporter into printing a puff piece about her. She probably also never thought for a moment that a reporter and photographer might be smarter than anyone in the White House. Either Chris Whipple and Christopher Anderson are geniuses, or the core of the White House senior staff and the Secretary of State are all idiots. How could Susie Wiles have spoken so freely and not realized that the resulting article would not show her or her boss in a good light? How could Marco Rubio and JD Vance and Stephen Miller and Karoline Leavitt have posed for that photographer and not realized that he wasn’t there to make them look pretty? 

The whole crusty crew are in damage control mode now, but the damage is done, and I’m here for it. I don’t feel sorry for Susie Wiles or for any of the rest of them, not even a tiny bit. For all the chaos and misery and destruction they’ve wrought, an unflattering feature story and some stark photos are the very least they deserve. I’m glad that the White House had a bad day yesterday. And I’m really glad that there are still some journalists out there. 

Waving at a squirrel

It’s the middle of December, 7:30 in the morning, and quite cold - cold for everywhere, but especially cold for Maryland. Something is wrong with our furnace, so it’s cold inside and out, but I have a space heater blowing right at me, so I’m fine. The rest of the house feels like a postwar bedsit in London, but my little spot is fine, even cozy. 

I’m looking out the window, watching a fat little squirrel who appears to be watching me, too. He’s very still, and his little paws are resting on his very round belly, and he’s just staring. This fat little squirrel (no fat-shaming, it’s December and a squirrel should be fat) has a rotund, dark brown and light brown mottled body - an unusual phenotype. He also has a very fluffy tail. I want to open the blinds all the way to see him more clearly but then I’d scare him away. 

After a few minutes, the fat little squirrel climbed down the fence on his own. I guess he realized that he wasn’t getting any food from me, and that he’d have to go out and find his own breakfast. I hope he found some good birdseed on the ground. The birds get everything handed to them, and they’re wasteful with the seeds. 

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We thought that the furnace was fixed yesterday. Someone came and fixed it and left with more money than he had when he came in, and it did work for a few hours, but then it stopped. The furnace guy is coming back to figure out what he might have missed. It was cold in most of the house last night, but we had a fire in the family room and a space heater in the kitchen, and we were very comfortable. It’s cold outside, so I do hope we can get the furnace fixed but if not, I think we can live without it for a bit. 

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It’s Friday now, 13 days before Christmas. I have a lot to do but I have already done quite a bit. My tree is up and decorated, and I wrapped all of the presents that I have already bought. I still have some shopping to do but I won’t have a huge pile of parcels to wrap on Christmas Eve. 

Yesterday, my mother turned 81. I tend to get into full Christmas gear on my mother’s birthday, December 11, exactly two weeks out. When we were children, we started the Christmas countdown on the 11th. It’s the same length of time now as then, but a countdown to a long-anticipated celebration is a different thing from a countdown to a hard deadline. When you’re a grown-up, Christmas is a deadline. It shows up on December 25 whether we’re ready or not. 

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It’s Saturday now, 9:15 AM and I have a plan for today. Two pounds of butter are sitting on the kitchen counter, and everyone has been warned not to put the butter back in the refrigerator. That butter is exactly where I want it. I also have flour, sugar, brown sugar, baking soda, vanilla extract, eggs, and four bags of Nestle semi-sweet chocolate chips. 

Yes, that’s right - it’s Cookie Day, bitches!

Please excuse me. You’re not bitches at all. You’re lovely people. I just like to say “It’s Cookie Day, bitches!” Laughing at my own jokes is one of my coping strategies. I’m easily amused. That’s why I’m such a delight. 

Yes, Cookie Day is coming a week earlier than usual. I mean, it seems like Potato Day was just yesterday. But my son will be home next weekend after a weeklong swim team training trip in Florida, and he wants us to do something together as a family, and I also have Christmas parties to attend, and so I moved Cookie Day up a week so that I can be social next weekend. I know from experience that I can’t handle cookies and parties in one weekend. So today, I’ll make the cookies and freeze them. As always, I’m not looking forward to cookie baking at all - AT ALL - but I’ll be happy not to be spending next weekend in the kitchen. 

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It’s Sunday morning, clear and sunny and very cold, and it snowed a bit overnight, so it’s sparkly and bright outside. Even better, my freezer is stocked with hundreds of cookies that I made yesterday. We have cookies for days. We have cookies to serve guests and we have cookies to give as gifts. 

It was an all-day thing, making those cookies, a task that combines two of the things that I like least: Disorder and tedium. Making cookie dough is tedious, and rolling out the little balls of dough and laying them out on cookie sheets and putting them into the oven and taking them out and laying them out on the cooling racks while monitoring the next batch in the oven is mind-numbingly tedious. The only thing that keeps me from lapsing into a coma when I’m making cookies is the heart-palpitating anxiety of being surrounded by a mess and not being able to do anything about it. It’s hard to express just how happy I was to slide the last batch of cookies into a freezer bag, a happiness surpassed only by finally getting my kitchen clean. I’ll still find little bits of cookie dough or tiny spills of flour for the next few days, but it looks clean in there, and I don’t have to make cookies again for another year if I don’t want to. And I won’t want to. 

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It’s ten days until Christmas now. I am not 100 percent ready but I’m so much more ready now than I was at this time last week. Most of my shopping is done and everything I’ve purchased so far is wrapped and under a tree that is fully decorated. Between the tree and the other decorations inside and out, the house looks very festive, if a little cluttered. Christmas is the only time that I like a little clutter. I grew up in a tiny rowhouse in Philadelphia in the 70s and 80s. In December, we covered every surface in those little houses with Christmas swag. Watch the original Run-DMC “Christmas in Hollis” video if you want to see what working class inner city homes looked like at Christmas time back in the day. 

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There’s just over a week until Christmas now, and just over two weeks until this year comes to an end. I’ve learned the hard way during the past few years not to get snotty with my sendoff to the outgoing year because its replacement will invariably barge in with a bad attitude and a surplus “hold my beer” energy. At least I’m not one of those deluded people out here saying that there’s nowhere to go but up; that 2026 can’t possibly be any worse than 2025. We’re nowhere near hitting bottom. 2026 could absolutely be worse than 2025. So I’m going to keep it respectful. 

I saw the fat little squirrel again today. He’s a distinctive-looking squirrel, so I’m reasonably sure that it’s the same one. No Christmas for squirrels, but he’s still getting ready. He’s burying nuts and eating everything in sight. Between his considerable fat stores and his buried treasure, he’ll be more than able to withstand the winter. And that’s all it is to him, just winter. He won’t observe the passage from one year to the next. He’s lucky because he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. But I’m luckier because I can hope. After all, 2026 could also be absolutely better than 2025. It should certainly try. 

Drift into Christmas

It snowed yesterday, for the first time this winter. I went to work early in the very gray December morning, driving very carefully on streets that were beginning to ice over amid just sub-freezing temperatures. It was rather gloomy but nice. Peaceful. I made it to work in plenty of time. 

December 5, which was yesterday, is early for snow in Maryland, but it’s not crazy early, and it wasn’t a lot of snow. It’s clear and cold and bright this morning and there’s a pretty coating of snow on everything. It looks Christmassy. 

For the last few weeks, I’ve been drifting through the days. To look at me, you wouldn’t know that anything was off, but everything is off. I’m only halfway here. But it’s Christmastime, and I have Christmastime things to do. It’s Saturday morning and I have a whole day ahead of me to shop for presents and decorate the tree that’s sitting in my living room and maybe watch a Christmas movie. 

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I grew up in Philadelphia in the 70s and 80s, and the radio was our constant companion. We listened to the radio in the car, of course. But we also listened to the radio at home. I had a clock radio alarm clock, and I listened in my room all the time. We turned the kitchen radio on first thing in the morning, and we brought it outside so that we could listen on the front stoop. WMGK and WDAS and WMMR and WIOQ and WXPN were our soundtrack. 

Riding in the back seats of our parents’ cars, we started waiting for the first Christmas song of the season right around Thanksgiving. Hearing “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” (The Jackson 5 or Bruce Springsteen) or the Carpenters’ “Merry Christmas Darling” or even the barking dogs Jingle Bells song for the first time was a highlight of the year. 

Now I listen to Sirius in the car. I listen to Spotify when I’m walking. I don’t hear commercial radio very often anymore, but on Friday morning, I was listening to a local station, and Elton John’s “Step into Christmas” started playing just as I was about to drive onto the base. The star on the top of the Walter Reed tower was twinkling and the snow was falling. It looked like Christmas; and just for a moment, it felt like Christmas. 

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I shopped on Saturday. I’m not finished, not by any means, but I made a huge dent in my list. Then, in uncharacteristic fashion, I got to work wrapping very soon after I got home. The dining room table is piled high with wrapped gifts, because the tree still isn’t decorated, so I can’t put the presents under the tree just yet. We’ll get to the tree in a day or so. Everyone is busy. 

It’s only Monday now, a very still and silent and cold white-gray December Monday, but I’m already planning for this weekend’s holiday tasks. More shopping, more wrapping, and cookies. I could happily skip all of this, but my family loves Christmas, and there’s something to be said for doing something just because it makes other people happy - even (especially) if it’s a thing you don’t really want to do. I’m not in a Christmas mood yet. But I’m going to fake it until I make it.