morning after, morning after christmas

The Christmas day is done. Family visit to Marblehead already a memory: babies, laughter, wrapping paper and my sister's wholesome roast. Yesterday we guested my spouse's brother and his spouse and two of their three sons and those mens' significant others. Whew! Fun!

Dinner of spiral ham and winter root vegetables and chocolate this and that and crab appetizers and games and laughter and some football watching and waiting for the monster snowstorm that did arrive but not as yet the monster predicted although there is still snow falling and winds whipping and the possibility of mammoth storm remains. I imagine people outside are not having a great time of this.

This morning I've been darning socks and picking up from company and feeling grateful that the Jets, although losing yesterday, managed to secure a place in the NFL playoff system and I've been caring from Timmy and washing dishes and noodling with this new attempt at blogging.

Odd: post Christmas blues are nowhere nearby. I am thinking warmly of friends south of here (in New Jersey) and hoping they are waking to solid senses of selves as I feel today.

Odd, because the 'magic' gift did not arrive this year as it hasn't since it last showed up when I was ten years old. I am told by the spiritual practices that I follow that the gift has already manifest and it's only for me to remove the scales or breathe with greater gratitude of help another and it will shine like the promise it keeps whispering.

My spouse and daughter are watching a pay per view movie about a lesbian couple whose son and daughter are contacting their sperm-donor father and all kinds of shenanigans are about to develop (I can hear the sound from the tv-sunroom) once the women discover what the kids are up to. I've seen the trailers for the film and felt queasy because I once loved a woman who... well I don't think i'm enough of a blogger to go there quite yet. Point is: I'm keeping to myself and keeping to whatever thoughts come now rather than roaming into television land.

My parents organized six piles of presents in our apartment living room each Christmas Eve after we (their six kids) we sleeping. We woke -generally around 4:00 or 5:00am, as I recall and made our way to our designated pile and pulled, ripped, opened and played for hours until the noise dropped and the presents were unrecognizable for the wrapping paper and my father disappeared (to bed, again?) and we made ready to do nothing and to wait for our Christmas meal or prepared to travel to my mother's sister's home to join our cousins. We had fulfilled our Christmas Mass obligation at midnight and were thus 'free' to enjoy the secular with as much abandon as an Irish-American Catholic child is allowed. Childhood Christmas mornings sit pleasantly in my mind and my guess is that both my parents worked to make the least amount of stress for our sakes.

We lived in NYC - in northern Manhattan, in a residential neighborhood that was unlike the image most people carry of Manhattan --- no office buildings and no rushing maddening crowds. Middle class and working class ethnics attached to community and church and loosely to one another as the situation (i.e. keeping other ethics at bay) fit. Manhattan neighborhoods were notoriously provincial when I was a boy and though I am uncertain it they remain so I recall few 'others' among us. I thought for years that Christmas was an almost exclusively Catholic celebration and believed that other Christians paid it lip service and Jewish people may have considered it a hostile intrusion on their lives. We were, as I said, provincial.

Did I mention this is my very first 'real' blog?