On the First Day of Christmas...

The day started before midnight amidst several thousand people in the giant cave of Grace Cathedral and next to my daughter, standing, singing (and me crying through it all) Oh Come All Ye Faithful and smiling, weeping, swooning with what I experience of the magic of the myth and the grace of the story.

It really started much earlier in the evening when I had dinner at my daughter's new place and she, her boyfriend, his brother, and I opened presents, laughed, talked and ate an amazing vegetarian repast (concluded with bronzing our own creme brule'e). After that, Jen and I headed to the church.

The service, as always was a moment of clarity, encouragement and affirmation in the midst of an awful lot of confusion, a time to stop, to remember why we exist on the planet and to live out the hope that we might be able to do it better this circuit around the sun. Alan Jones sermon was especially poignant this year, the night was magical, musical and worshipful (and you can hear the entire two hour service here).

I got up this morning and opened a few really wonderful presents from friends and family (thank you so much!) and then sat down with a glass of champagne, and lox and bagels to watch the movie Scrooge, my favorite version of the miraculous (and always life-transforming) Dickens' story.


After that it was lunch time and for some reason (I don't know whether it's the Christmases I spent in Arizona, or the winter trip that Marsha and I made to Santa Fe where I discovered the dish, but Mexican food in general and stuffed pasilla chilis in particular, mean Christmas to me. My chef housemate Matt left me a particularly wonderful version of the stuffed pepper for which I prepared a black bean sauce with roasted red pepper salsa... Red & Green, sharp and spicy; whatever it is, it says Christmas to me.

Finally, in a couple of hours I'm off with a huge bowl of my Shockingly Decadent and Unbelievably Miraculous Egg Nog to spend an evening of eating, drinking, chatting and singing.

Beats a Partridge in a Pear Tree... but not Kwan Yin in a blue box.

Jen and I even caught a glimpse of Santa roaming through downtown San Francisco at about 1:30 in the morning. Jen made the observation that he must of lost his reindeer. Maybe that'd be why he showed up in the Bayou last night with eight alligator instead... well, at least that's the report I heard.