Christmas (a belated update): Mid-December

I can’t believe it’s the end of January already, we’re gearing up for Valentine’s Day (the next big thing here) and I haven’t even mentioned our actual Christmas.

Well, thinking back, it was pleasant and fun and the usual stuff, but at the time I think I had a special kind of panic bouncing around inside me. I guess it was because of being in a new place, because I had no idea if the social niceties I take for granted at home were of any relevance here at all. Not that it matters for just us at home, but it was all that fuss over who’s supposed to get a gift or a card, and what sort of gift or card it should be. Really quite silly to panic over that, as Ahmed so frequently (and helpfully!) pointed out to me during December. But as I snapped at him after the twenty-seventh time he suggested I chill out, if Mum’s don’t do Christmas, it invariably doesn’t happen. Which raises the question of why it is that Santa gets all the credit, when Mrs Claus obviously has as much, if not more, to do with it coming off successfully.

Anyway, as I think I mentioned earlier, I figured out that some nicely gift-wrapped festive home cooking would take care of most of the gift issues, and cards can always be sent last minute. As I was deciding it was time… now – go! … to go and buy Christmas supplies (I simply have to be psyched up to start Christmas and won’t be stopped once I’ve got going), my Mother-in-law arrived for a week, on her way to meet Brother-in-law and his wife visiting relatives in Egypt. Love the rellies and all that, but they don’t do Christmas and I’m not sure they understand what the fuss is about, so I was a bit concerned that I wouldn’t be able to get everything done in time. Fortunately M-i-l needed to shop for gifts to take to the relatives she was on her way to visit, also fortunate was the fact that school was in session and work was demanding so we could shop without kids and husband slowing us down.

Thus the second week of December was (another) shopping frenzy from which I emerged with 100+ pretty satin and glass decorations (extremely inexpensive which means the ones at home must be obscenely expensive), an eight-inch lighted Christmas angel, miles of gold and white ribbon, an expansive ‘tree skirt’, red and white Christmas stockings, two packs of twinkling lights to decorate our balcony… and a three foot pre-wired lighted plastic tree. Just in case you haven’t clicked yet, a three foot tree needs perhaps a dozen or so decorative items… (you work it out). We ended up with what looked like a pile of satin and glass balls with coloured flashing lights scattered among them and a precariously balanced angel wobbling on top. Tree? What tree? No greenery to be seen here. Talk about the excesses of Christmas! Logic departs when you’re in a shopping frenzy. We do usually have a bigger tree each year, but this year we couldn’t figure out where to get one (of course it turned out there were plenty of places and lots of special types of trees all of them much more suited to the traditional idea of a Christmas tree than our pines at home), nor could we figure out how to get it up to the apartment without making a big mess, and then get it out once the hullabaloo was all over. So plastic tree it was, but (duh!) I just didn’t twig how small three feet was till I took it out of the box. It might have looked a little less overdone if sanity had prevailed, but when Yasmin was having such a good time hanging decorations with me, it seemed a shame to stamp on her enthusiasm. And then the school sent home the plethora of things they’d had the kids making all through the month as well – snowflakes, a Santa sleigh made of candy canes and chocolates, ice-skates, bell, a gingerbread man, and for the front door, a paper version of a Christmas wreath. (Add all this to the gazillion items made for Thanksgiving and Halloween and you can begin to see the looming storage and transport difficulty coming up.) Once that was done and set up, so began the nightly ritual of plugging in the tree lights and the angel, and going outside to plug in the balcony lights (the ‘discussions’ about who would go out at 11pm and unplug them was a less easily agreed matter – oh, the trickery and chicanery was employed to avoid that cold balcony in the dead of night). With darkness coming on at around 4.30 in the afternoons it was good to get our money’s worth out of the lights. We’ll have to leave them behind as they work off American electricity, which is unlike any other, but we don’t have a balcony for them anyway. They were pretty while they lasted, and considering hardly anyone else on our side of the building had decorated their suspended outdoor space, a bit flashy really. You could see them a mile away.

Talking of Christmas decorations, one of our favourite things to do was to take a drive after dark and check out all the suburban streets. That whole ‘decorations-to-the-extreme’ thing from those cheesy Christmas movies is the real deal. There were miles of lights on display throughout December. Front gardens with inflatable, lighted Santa’s, snowmen, reindeer, polar bears (?), elves, sleighs – you name it, it was there, even the occasional nativity scene (some here haven’t forgotten that aspect of Christmas, it seems). One home-owner had actually wired up the 60ft live tree in his front yard with I don’t know how many miles of coloured lights. It looked amazing. Even some of the big corporate buildings had had their gardens wired – nets of lights over shrubs, and trails of lights outlining the naked tree branches. When it’s done well, it does look fantastic. By the same token, when it’s done badly…. I did see a few front yards with plants and trees that looked ok by daylight but at night were spindly skeletons because someone had been a bit stingy with the lights. Better none at all than half a job, I say. It wasn’t quite a proper white Christmas, but it certainly was a bright Christmas.

The other thing those cheesy movies always have is that last minute rush for Christmas items before they are sold out. That too is the real deal. I went back a week later (this is still some days before Christmas itself) to get more decorations (not for me this time) and they were almost all gone. So I was glad I’d followed my instincts and started when I did or we’d have had a pretty light-on festive season, decorations-wise. Of course, gifts were another matter. High demand items and some of the good stuff did sell out quickly, but a consumer culture can’t survive without yards and yards of unnecessary consumer items, so there was plenty about in the gift department if you weren’t too fussy about what to give, with every store having a sale better than the next. It was a bit of a crush and scramble towards the end, but it’s the same every place that Christmas has become about ‘stuff’. The service was no better than any other time, and perhaps because of the increased number of staff at the registers available to have a chat with each other, probably worse. Not once did I get served by someone who wasn’t having a conversation with someone else, either a co-worker, a supervisor, a telephone, or at one point, another customer (as an ‘associate’ tried to serve two of us at once – and failed miserably. One dissatisfied customer and one no-sale – I gave up and went and got something else instead.)

For a change of pace from shopping, M-i-l and I took ourselves into NYC for a day trip. Me to source a Christmas surprise I hinted at in a previous blog, M-i-l for a walk, or so it seemed. Man, that woman likes to walk. We took the train into the city, the simplest and more relaxing option, then once we got out at Grand Central Terminal, we walked NYC. So far we’ve not seen a great deal of the city, so I was happy to stroll around and check out new stuff. You know, the easy things, like see buildings of interest, figure out where Central Park is, that sort of stuff. Because of the season there were plenty of festive treats out. Ten foot high Little Tin Soldiers (wooden?) outside FAO Schwarz, lots of window and street decorations. We pretended we were actually looking to buy a purse in Prada (the price of a family holiday to Florida) and took a stroll through the also overpriced (and often quite ugly) merchandise at Bergdorf Goodman’s. I peeped in the window of Fendi and Tiffany, but there’s not much to see that way. You need a pile of cash or a very good credit limit to even window shop that part of Fifth Avenue. People who shop here would never buy bargains or reduced items. It looked as if paying full price was itself a status symbol, the bigger the price tag the better – or actually, not a price tag. The most expensive items aren’t tagged, nothing so tacky, they might have a discreet card tucked inside or you have to ask. And you know what they say… if you have to ask, you can’t afford it. I concede, I can’t afford it. At least not until some publisher offers me an enormous advance to publish this blog as a sensationally popular novel for housewives…

We dropped into one of Donald Trump’s places for lunch. His staff served us a sandwich and a coffee in the ‘cheap seats’ area of the lobby. There’s a forty-odd foot high wall of water decorating the room. It runs down gold-flecked marble tiles, or at least it looks something like that. I expected the place to be a little tackier than it is, but it’s not so bad actually, and kind of democratic. The cheap seats are separated from the more expensive restaurant seating by a low wall, so it looks like everyone can enjoy the same ‘luxurious experience’ regardless of economic situation…that is as long as you can afford the $7.50 sandwich and $5 coffee. We checked out the fancy ladies’ room on the way out and continued walking New York. I felt revived after lunch, but M-i-l set a cracking pace and it wasn’t long before I was looking about for a subway station. Another few blocks and I was thinking about getting a cab. I even started to eye up the horse and carriage rides at Central Park, a quick jaunt along the southern edge of the park might be a leg-saver, but at $34 for half an hour, I figured I’d push on. We made it up to Columbus Circle, which was being renovated so wasn’t all that interesting, and looked around the little tented market stalls there. Loads of very expensive ‘hand-made’ artisan items. A posher version of the Sunday St Kilda market. Nothing caught my eye and I didn’t see many people actually buying, but there were a good few browsers like myself. At this point it was time to start thinking about making our way back to the train station. I had to make a quick stop in Times Square, which turned out to be a long trip up and down the street looking for a particular shop which I managed to walk past three times before I found it. Picked up some stuff and then the last leg back along 42nd Street to Grand Central. No dramas finding our train platform and we made it back home in time to call Ahmed to come and get us on his way to pick up Yasmin from school.

Apart from being footsore, we both enjoyed our day out by ourselves. M-i-l and I have about the same level of interest in shopping. A quick look to see if there’s anything worth our interest and if not, move on. If it’s interesting, it doesn’t take very long to figure out if it’s a ‘buy it’ or a ‘not today’. I hate dawdling around shops, especially when there’s nothing remotely interesting to me there. I do, on this particular point, understand husbands. However that does not excuse mine from coming on shopping trips when required.

M-i-l’s trip ended and Ahmed drove her to JFK for the next part of her trip. I had a week’s breathing space before Sister-in-law arrived to spend Christmas with us. That involved another round of intense shopping, as you would expect with a teenage relative. Malls were her entertainment of choice but we did get away from them once the pre-Christmas hoo-haa was over and done with. In that spare week I made those Christmas puddings, baked brown sugar shortbread, gift wrapped it all and delivered it where it needed to go, wrote cards and letters, and made a significant contribution to the economic viability of the US postal service. I wrapped all the gifts I already had lying around the house. Then realised that Santa had not only been generous, he was, to say the least, ridiculous, especially when you consider we have to transport all this stuff back home later this year.

But it wasn’t until Christmas Day that we really saw just how ridiculous Santa had been…