Too Many MCs, Not Enough Mics...

In other words, what do you do when you anticipated that your holiday party would be ill attended as it's 10 days before Christmas and tons of people actually love you and decide to come! Ha ha. What a glorious problem to have! But seriously, turnout is on track to be better than I'd anticipated so I'm very excited and looking forward to seeing how many people can fit into 500 square feet of Brooklyn apartment space. I have decreed that no one is allowed to wear big pants or ball gowns. That would take up unnecessary space.

Skinny pants are okay, as long as you don't wear a belt with them in hipster white. That would be too much for my tiny mind to handle.

But the point is this: It's Christmas Time in New York! (Holiday time, if you want to include those other ones...)

Christmas in New York is spectacular. As the days grow shorter and one doesn't even manage to leave the office before nightfall, it's uplifting to see that the street lights are strung with garlands and snowflakes made of lights. I love the crowds clogging Rockefeller Center to get a glimpse of the enormous tree, which never fails to both impress me and make me a little bit sad. So beautiful! So festive! I can't believe we killed that tree!

Somehow the lights and the buzz of holiday shopping and throngs of tourists whip me into a Christmas frenzy and I start doing things like drinking Gingerbread Lattes and mulling wine. Suddenly stew seems like a perfectly viable meal option and brussel sprouts are back in full force. Window boxes in Brooklyn shed their flowers for those cabbage things that go all red in the middle.

When I was a kid we came to New York City during the holiday season to see both Showboat on Broadway and to see the Radio City Music Hall's Christmas Spectacular, complete with dancing girls and Santa. Ever since, I've loved Christmas in New York. Apparently lots of people do because you can't get a hotel room between Thanksgiving and New Year's without forking over quite a wad of cash. Makes having that apartment even sweeter.

In keeping with the "embarrassing things that my parents did to us as children" theme I've been developing lately, I'll share the downside of that trip to NYC back when I was about 12. Just old enough to be mortified. By what, you ask?

My mother decided to dress the four of us into outfits as "old fashioned" as we could muster without actually having to go shopping. Kind of crossed with this furry babushka thing - furry hats and furry muffs. On top of the costuming, which was almost too much for a 12 year old trying so hard to be cool to even bear, we then had to go out in the most public of places.

We had to ice skate in Rockefeller Center while she took pictures of us.

If you can't see why this would mortify a 12-year old, I cannot help you. Needless to say, it kind of killed the joy of being one of those ice skaters making endless circles between the golden angels blowing on their trumpets, under that giant, sparkling tree. Those pictures still make me cringe on the inside, remembering the awkward, clumsy girl I was at that age, bumping into things, fretting over who had the other half of my "best friends" necklace.

It makes me sigh with relief that I'm now an adult and on the other end of the Santa spectrum, as in pretending to be Santa instead of pretending to believe in Santa.

Stay tuned for notes on the Holiday Child Extravaganza, the time the pogo stick was thrown on the roof because "Santa dropped it" and the joys of the White Elephant gift swap.

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