Бульон с клецками is like chicken noodle soup, without the chicken and without the noodles and with farina dumplings instead. My mom makes it for us when we’re sick and also just as a meal and expression of love, this weekend included. For most of my childhood I took for granted that it was Russian—but when I tried to talk about it with my Russian friends in undergrad none of them had heard of it or anything like it. I decided it wasn’t Russian, so I decided it was Jewish, some version of matzo ball soup—but when I asked my parents it turned out it came from my paternal grandmother, the Russian side of my dad’s family, not the Jewish side. So we decided it wasn’t Jewish, either. When we set out to solve the mystery of where it came from the closest we found was a Polish dish, and then I found a Hungarian recipe, which mentions that it is popular in Eastern Europe as well, and that it is indeed a version of matzo ball soup—so both Jewish and Russian and other cultures’, despite being a mystery to seemingly everyone directly in our lives but us. I asked more Russian friends and one of them had distant family and acquaintances who have it in their families. I have no idea how the recipe got into my family if it didn’t get into theirs; for all I know it came from a friend of a friend and not from a long line of relatives—horizonal transmission rather than vertical, maybe bouncing around between Jewish and Russian and back again and again until it reached us.
Here is my mom’s recipe, passed on from my paternal grandmother—
Ingredients:
Broth
An egg
Farina (манка)
Flour
Salt
Process:
Heat up a bit more than a soup bowl full of broth.
Whisk one egg with a fork in a bowl.
Add two pinches of salt.
Stir about a third of a cup farina into the egg. The exact amount might vary, but the important thing is that it should look like this:
Stir about one eight cup into the egg-farina mixture. As before the exact amount might vary, but the important thing is it should look like this:
The broth should be boiling now; if it’s not then wait for it to boil.
Stick the ends of two spoons in the broth to heat them up—it’s very important that they are heated.
Scoop up spoonfuls of the dough, stick the spoon with the dough in the broth, and let the dough fall off into the broth. If the dough gets stuck on the spoon, use your second spoon to scrape it off into the broth.
Leave the dumplings on the stove for a few minutes. They’ll be ready pretty quickly.
Transfer to a bowl, get a new spoon, and eat.
As a bonus, here’s a fancy avocado salad my grandmother created after doing what she usually does to get recipes, which is to read a ton of recipes on the Internet and then let her neural nets process them into the resulting final recipe.
2 avocados—peel and cut them small.
3 eggs, hard-boiled—cut slightly bigger than the avocados.
A little cilantro or a similar small leafy thing—chop small.
Green onion, 3 stems—cut off the roots and then chop and add the white and green parts.
Juice of one lemon.
Salt to taste.
According to the Internet you can also add mayonnaise, but my grandmother doesn’t.
Here are some photos of the sunset at Shaver’s Creek, in Central Pennsylvania, this past weekend:
This blog post is not about Stranger Things. These are a list of songs that would save me from Vecna, the robotics company in Waltham that has repeatedly appeared to me ever since I started college, as if an apparition, coincidentally at the time and place of career fairs.
Bourrée in E minor by Johann Sebastian Bach
This is a song that my mom plays on acoustic guitar, and has played on acoustic guitar since I was small. I associate it with memories of her playing it, at each stage of my life and in each apartment or house we’ve lived in. And sometimes she plays it when we go somewhere local to be outside for a few days as a family, so it reminds me of the forest and the cold summer air in Pennsylvania. It is very precious and special to me.
Help! by the Beatles
When I was young music was on tapes, and then CDs. (I missed the tape era but tapes were still around, lots of them, and all the sound playing equipment played tapes.) When we first moved to the United States my parents had Help! on CD and we listened to the CD all the way through, so I remember the whole album by heart. This is the song I know best and the one I like the most.
My grandfather learned English in part by listening to the Beatles. So I also associate this song and this album and the Beatles in general with him. I miss him, and when I hear this song I think of him happy and dancing and laughing and joking and young.
Песня полярных летчиков by Александр Городницкий
Перекаты by Александр Городницкий
Two more songs from an album that we had on tape or CD, and which I associate with the forest and with camping. Александр Городницкий was an extremely talented Russian songwriter and bard. My mom grew up with his music and I grew up with his music. When we first moved to the United States we lived in Chicago and we had a very tightknit group of friends who had also recently emigrated from the former Soviet Union, who were all around the same age and whose children if they had children were around my age. We would go camping together and we would all sit around the campfire and someone had a guitar and would play the music and everyone would sing these songs. My mom sings them beautifully and it is especially beautiful to hear everyone singing together. The smell of burning wood always brings me back to these memories, and camping, and the sounds of crickets and frogs and cold nights and trees overhead.
These are my two favorite songs by Александр Городницкий. They are both about facing challenges.
The first song (translated lyrics here) describes pilots stranded during a blizzard waiting for the opportunity to fly again. My favorite lyric is “Снова ночь нелётная даже для луны” (“Again the night is flightless, even for the moon”).
The second song (translated lyrics here) is called rapids, and it is about rapids, real and metaphorical. In the Soviet Union accurate maps were illegal, so people who went hiking/backpacking/canoeing drew unofficial maps—outlines/sketches. The song is about not knowing what is coming next, making your way as best as you can by outline/sketch rather than a real map, and reminiscing about cozier times (and, I feel, feeling comforted that those cozy times will continue to exist, somewhere, after you are gone), and it is about the end of the summer, and it may or may not be about death though death is of course discordant with the tone of the song.
This song is a bit of an enigma. I’ve heard various stories about what inspired it and they are all tragic and probably all wrong. There are very serious rivers (everywhere, including in the United States—not just in the former Soviet Union) that have specific ways you must move through them—you must turn right here or pass this rock on the left—, and if you miss any one of these turns, you will die. One version of the song’s backstory is that it was inspired by the author’s friend(s), who, missing one of the crucial turns, were carried through the rapids in their boat to their certain death with the whole rest of the party watching as they drifted away, helpless to save them. Another version of the song’s backstory is that a group of friends in Siberia are on a canoe or kayak trip and they know they will not make it to safety before the winter.
I listen to this song sometimes when I feel stuck. I love this song.
Slice Me Nice by Fancy
This is a very silly song and it is complete nonsense. My dad used to listen to it when he worked out and my first memories of it are hearing it playing from the basement sometime this past decade. It’s one of hundreds and hundreds of songs from my dad’s childhood and it is one of my favorites. My dad did not understand English when he originally heard and liked this song, so it was perfectly fine, maybe even better, that the lyrics are nonsense. I like to play it while I’m slicing things when we are making dinner. (I don’t usually cook, but I can slice.)
The next round of songs are from my parents’ adolescence, which means they are from my childhood.
In the Soviet Union when my parents were growing up tapes were smuggled in and sold illicitly (selling western tapes might land you in jail—not because western music was illegal, but because selling it was illegal entrepreneurship). You could buy a real tape like the ones sold in Europe, but it cost about a week’s salary, or for a day’s salary you could get a lower quality tape from a recording studio. The way you usually got tapes was by copying them from copied tapes that your friends had, but the copies got worse the farther along they were in the copy-chain, like a game of telephone. It was generally understood that if you had a tape, you would of course share it with all of your friends so that everyone could have a copy. (Before tapes people copied vinyl records onto old x-rays, jazz records especially.)
You could also listen to (and record) western music from AM radio, though that would be even worse quality, especially when you factored in the sounds the government would play on the same frequency to try to block it out. A lot of people got their music by listening to Seva Novgorodsev on the BBC Russian Service. (Seva was knighted in the United Kingdom for portraying the UK positively in the Soviet Union.)
These are the songs that are most burrowed into my brain from their respective CDs and tapes, which were among many, many CDs and tapes we had in Chicago. A lot of my memories of our first apartment (or maybe the apartment after that in the same building) when we moved from Moscow to Chicago have those CDs and tapes playing in the background.
Most of these songs are from 1970s Germany. Keep in mind that almost no one listening to this music in the Soviet Union understood any of the words.
In For A Penny, In For A Pound by Arabesque
Moscow by Dschinghis Khan
What in the heck was going on in Germany in the 70s.
Rasputin by Boney M
Media was tightly controlled by the government and Moscow by Dschinghis Khan and Rasputin by Boney M were not allowed to be played officially on the radio or TV, though you could listen to them at your own house. My dad says that when there was a Boney M concert in Moscow they started the concert with the intro music to Rasputin but did not play the actual song.
Daddy Cool by Boney M
My dad says he was so sick of Daddy Cool by the mid-80s that he couldn’t listen to anything on that record and still can’t listen to it. It was way too popular (in private, not on radio) and worse my dad had a copy.
Killer Queen by Queen
When I was 12 I started my new school for that year which was Whitney Young Magnet High School in Chicago, and I was in the Academic Center program that more or less tumbled 7th and 8th graders into high school classes, though we had our own separate classroom for core subjects. I met some of my best childhood friends that year; we had a very tightknit nerdy friend group and some of us still keep in touch. School let out early, 1:something instead of the 3: something I’d gotten used to, so when I got home I’d spent an hour or so eating and decompressing before thinking about homework. We had this Queen album on tape, which meant if I wanted to listen to a song on repeat I had to rewind it to just the right spot each time, and I played the album on our grey boombox in the kitchen and this was my favorite song to dance to.
Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd
The next year we moved to Central Pennsylvania, I started 8th grade, then I was in 9th grade and in Pennsylvania I became a different person, or more accurately I tried on two or three successive outer layers but was very much still myself underneath and with my family and closest friends.
Those first few summers in particular were very memorable to me, the kinds of months when years happen, probably because there was so much change happening in my life. We spent a lot of time wandering around outside. Wish You Were Here is a song from those summers to me; I most viscerally remember it playing in a cute hippie-vibe store called the Apple Tree downtown (not much of a downtown for me with childhood so far being in Chicago), which has since closed. This song, to me, is my childhood in the past and what Central Pennsylvania felt like in the summer and biking at 9pm with the sun still up and the whole idea of everything being transient and simultaneously happy and sad.
Where Is My Mind? by the Pixies
This song, too, is from around that same time for me. A boy I saw for about a year, who was/is an artist and who was very sweet to me, made me mixtape CDs sometimes and this was on one of them. I think making someone a mixtape is a very personal and underrated gesture. Back then we listened to music on CDs or on the radio so that was how we shared music with each other. Burning a CD is a lot of work compared to how we share music now and then after you made your CD you could decorate it or write things on it. Very special.
Dancing in the Moonlight by King Harvest
I have no idea where or when I first heard this song—probably around those same years. I really love this song.
In high school, our method of sharing music got more sophisticated. We, specifically the tiny subset of us in our school who had immigrated with our parents from the former Soviet Union, especially me and a boy I was rather desperately obsessed with who had a much better understanding of whatever we dreamed up former Soviet Union culture was and a cool older brother who presumably had enhanced cool older brother cultural knowledge, brought in USB sticks to transfer music between each other’s laptops, especially from his laptop to mine because he was older and more recently arrived and the one with more of the better music. These are my two favorite songs that I absorbed during that time, I think from those data transfers, both by Земфира. You can find roughly translated lyrics here and here.
Прогулка by Земфира
Итоги by Земфира
Сказочная тайга by Агата Кристи
This song is associated with a very particular memory. My family in my dad’s black Suburban, my dad driving, this song playing, us on our way to some lovely outdoorsy adventure. This song is kind of nonsense but I love the ping!-ping!-ping! sounds that sound kind of how stars look. It makes me think of my family and it makes me think of stars between tree branches directly overhead in a cloudless sky.
Like a lot of these the song itself is not particularly special except that it stuck with me. A friend from Chicago let us burn a copy of a disk with this song and that disk lived in the car, which is why we played it in the car. Tragically the writer of the song has gone completely nuts in a political way.
New Romantics by Taylor Swift
I started listening to Taylor Swift when I was in high school and she was about the same age and I was growing up in Pennsylvania not too far from where she had been growing up not that long before. Taylor Swift is special to me; my moods and life path have followed the moods and paths of her albums quite faithfully, from our shared origin in Pennsylvania to college and all the human complexities of college to the vicissitudes of grad school.
Initially, I had painted my dorm room green. My desk was against the wall next to my door, so when I sat at my desk I could see the whole long hallway and anyone walking through I could see and say hi to. The hallway was well-populated because it was one of the crossover sites between the two buildings at their shared wall, and my room was also by the back stairwell.
Random Hall has a smell. I don’t mean that in a bad way, just that the building itself and its walls and its carpet have a very particular smell that has a very particular feeling in the nose and the mouth and the airways that I remember vividly, and I remember that smell most vividly of course lugging bags or boxes from whenever I came back after a time away. (It’s probably because the building is very old.)
1989 was the end of college as it is usually defined and the start of this bizarre endless grad student state I didn’t realize I’d be in for quite so long when I started it. 2014 was initially supposed to be my graduation year but I stuck around for my MEng (my master’s) and I was very excited to have gotten into the program and to be making excellent progress toward my dreams, which at that point were to someday get into a PhD program, preferably at Harvard in part because my ex had dropped out of a PhD program at Harvard but especially because I wanted to stay in Cambridge. I’d gotten an extra year extension to stay in my dorm and even in my exact dorm room, so I got to extend my existing life by a year before needing to move on in any way at all. When 1989 came out, in October, I was focusing on teaching—I was TAing 6.005, Elements of Software Construction, which took up most of my time, and most of my time when I wasn’t working on my own classwork was grading or code review or answering student questions. I would have been sat at the same desk in the same room, a few years older and having painted my room a new color (brown, for some unfathomable reason—well, the reason was that I wanted to live in an apartment and brown felt like a grown-up color). I think my main personal struggle was getting through my workload and getting the confidence to look for a lab to do my thesis work in. This was a few months before I started in the lab I’m in now and I think it is about when time melted into itself and dissolved. (I still don’t know why it did that, and I haven’t been able to get it to come back together since.)
New Romantics is my favorite song on 1989. It was my phone alarm for a long time, which meant it was the first thing I heard when I woke up every day.
Moving To New York by the Wombats
Moving To New York is originally, for me, from a burned copy of the Wombats’ first album from one of my closest friends in 8th grade through high school—who, ironically, ended up in Chicago, where I started. He even included a CD cover and a replica of the album cover printed on a color printer (color printers being especially rare for me to encounter in high school). That album and this song as my favorite from that album are prominent in my memories of and have followed me consistently through high school and college and then my master’s and the year between my master’s and my PhD and now my PhD. And all the music the Wombats (and Love Fame Tragedy) have made since then (and there are other favorite Wombats songs—especially Pink Lemonade and 21st Century Blues and Flip Me Upside Down).
Finally, three songs that I just really like. I don’t remember when I first heard them. They are special to me for no reason at all.
Just What I Needed by the Cars
The Lovecats by the Cure
It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me by Billy Joel
It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me, recently, is rollerblading round and round a tiny outdoor basketball court with my mom and riding in my car, my mom’s old car, with my partner, on the way to the post office, with the windows down, feeling, like that song always makes me feel, a bit like we’re in a fancy convertible.
There it is again, Vecna, followed us on a tote bag, probably from one of those same career fairs.
Christmas is special to me in a way that no other holiday is, because my only claim to it is that I am American. My other winter holidays are my birthright: Hanukkah I inherited from my Jewish ancestry, Russian Christmas and Old Russian New Year from my Russian Orthodox ancestry, and New Year I get simply for being part of a society that follows the Gregorian calendar. Christmas, or Catholic Christmas as most of the Russians I know call it, I have no innate claim to. Christmas, much more than even the 4th of July, is my special American holiday.
We immigrated in January 1995, when I was almost four, so our first Christmas in America was at nearly our first anniversary of living in the United States (my and my dad’s—my mom came over six months before us) and I would have been almost five. At that point I had experienced almost a full year in an American preschool. I’d learned the language, I had friends, and I had been fully indoctrinated with the traditions and expectations of an American childhood. Our first Christmas as a family is one of my personal origin stories, one of the small pieces of personal history that make up the core of my identity. As my mom tells it, when Christmas rolled around it was just another day for us. My parents were alarmed and confused that work was closed for the day, and that stores were closed for the day, and most inconveniently my preschool. I was less confused. I asked my mom: “Where are the presents? Why haven’t we invited anyone?” I knew it was Christmas. I had a very good sense of what was meant to happen on Christmas and I was very determined that Christmas should happen as was described to me in preschool and on television. I corralled Mom into getting presents together for my friends and at the last minute we called and invited all my Russian immigrant child friends and their families, my parents’ friends, to our apartment and we had a Christmas party. Mom says there might have already been a tree, since New Year’s was coming up and though most people didn’t decorate their tree until December 31st, people with kids often decorated it earlier. (In Russia, the tree goes up for New Year’s.) We got the presents at Kmart, and Kmart in Chicago on Christmas in the 90s was a mess—Mom says everything was on the floor, literally in piles on the ground and not on shelves, and that we were crawling through the piles on the floor looking for toys that were sufficiently together or whose pieces could be lined back up to make into suitable presents. Somehow we got presents for everyone and we wrapped them. Everyone had a really lovely time—the kids loved their presents and the celebration we were promised by society and the adults loved the company. (In full disclosure I’m not certain that all of the parents fully understood that the celebration was for Christmas; Mom says that as our guests were leaving some of the adults remarked that it was very nice to have gotten together just because, without it being anyone’s birthday or any other special occasion.) I think everyone in attendance was sufficiently newly arrived that it was everyone’s or almost everyone’s first or second American Christmas. This story feels particularly and joyfully American to me, a little island of childhood happiness in a process that I don’t think is easy for any family that goes through it. We were very new here, but we were determined to be Americans; we felt welcome to and all did our best impression of the traditions that were to be our chosen inheritance, a magical first American Christmas.
My strongest memories of Christmas in my childhood are memories of winter in Chicago, the first place we lived when we came to the United States. Until we moved away, every winter I had ice skating lessons at a lesser known outdoor ice rink downtown—it was down a hill and not visible from the street and maybe for that reason hardly ever had many people there. Mom would pick me up with food in the car after school; I ate in the car and then I spent the evening at the rink until Mom was done with work. Skating lessons were late in the evening, so I joined karate lessons by the rink before skating lessons started, or I did homework, or I would skate on the rink on my own, and then after skating lessons were over I would skate on my own or with whatever friends stayed late after lessons until it was time to go home. Those memories are very special to me. I remember the cold air, and skating as fast as I could until I tasted iron in my mouth, and hot chocolate with marshmallows from the hot chocolate vending machine, and the pain of warming my feet up after I couldn’t feel them anymore in the cold, and skating with friends, and skating alone, and the snow falling around me after sundown, the lights of downtown Chicago all around me and the starless night sky above me, Christmas music playing on the ice rink speakers. That is my Christmas tradition, and that is where I am transported by Christmas: by Christmas music, by ice skating, by dark cold city nights, by hot chocolate with marshmallows, by gently falling snow.
The rest of my Christmas memories are the polar opposite, set in Florida. When I was growing up we used to go camping in the Everglades. Those memories are of damp, warm air, of mangroves and of wind and pouring tropical rain, and of going to bed early on New Year’s Eve, vaguely cognizant of cheering and fireworks in the distance signaling the end of the year through a cloud of sleep.
I love hearing about my American friends’ Christmas traditions. Of course there are presents (for Christmas morning, though my family opens them on Christmas Eve because we are impatient), and the concept of Santa, and the nice-smelling tree with ornaments and lights on it and maybe a train or stuffed animals underneath. I really like string lights in general, and I especially enjoy little glass icicle ornaments and the way the colorful lights refract in them. (In the winter I am especially grateful to be Russian, since the Russian winter holidays give me an excuse to leave the tree and lights up through at least the first half of January.) I don’t think my family has ever done photos with Santa, but I have seen the lines at malls and of course seen them in movies. Christmas cards are also new to me as of the past decade, and I adore them. Our lab puts together an extremely thoughtful and elaborate holiday card every year, and last year was my and Cory’s first year sending Christmas cards ourselves. I’d long heard of stocking stuffers, but this year since we moved in with our friend PJ is the first year I’ve gotten to live with someone whose family hung fancy socks up with small presents in them, and gotten to see them hanging up, though I don’t fully understand what you’re supposed to do with them or the timing of it. I’m hoping maybe by next year I will have something of an understanding of the stockings. I’ve learned from Cory that there is meant to be a very large ham for dinner, which I don’t understand or find particularly appealing. This is the first year I’ve heard of and I absolutely do not understand the elf on a shelf. I also don’t understand caroling.
This year’s special new-to-me tradition has been advent calendars (“microdosing Christmas”). Cory and I have gotten a Lego advent calendar for a few years now, but this is my first year that I’ve really leaned into advent calendars and I’ve discovered I really like them—though the exact timing is always getting shifted around. (Doing something consistently every day, starting at a specific day and ending on another specific day, is it turns out a challenge, far too much of a challenge for this or honestly any other time of year.) We have a Lego advent calendar, a dog treat advent calendar, a chocolate advent calendar, and a tea advent calendar, and then I got my family three separate tea advent calendars, a recent out-of-print Lego City advent calendar, and, our favorite so far, an advent calendar with a new metal wire puzzle for each day, increasing in difficulty, whose components can hopefully be put in a nice basket for guests to enjoy once we’ve figured them all out. Advent calendars can also fancily lead to a culminating Christmas or New Year’s present on the same theme. (More wire puzzles, in other words.)
In true capitalist tradition, below are links to the wire puzzles I bought this year. These are links with my Amazon referral code. If you click one and buy something, I get about 4% of the price as commission.
(These photos are the puzzles we’ve opened so far—there are many more in the box.)
Each puzzle so far has been two loops that you are meant to separate. They’ve gotten more challenging as we’ve progressed, to the point that we’re starting to feel intimidated by what the end of the calendar is probably going to look like. I am pretty bad at these—or rather, they take me longer than anyone else in the family. My brother Max is absurdly fast. Our parents and grandmother are pretty speedy as well (but not as speedy as Max).
My grandfather on my mom’s side loved wire puzzles; the entirety of my mom’s side of the family grew up on them. I think he would be really excited that we are solving wire puzzles every day. They feel like a joyful way of honoring his memory, a little bit each day all month long.
The man living alone in the $4 million mansion across the street has over the past month gradually accumulated not one, not two, but six Christmas trees, at least, with lights and decorations on all the trees and outdoor lights on all his trees and fences outside, which he doesn’t have on a timer, like I thought he would, but turns on by hand every day at sunset, and garlands and strings of lights on the stairs and walls, lit up like a Christmas Gatsby mansion projecting green and red and blue and yellow onto the road when it rains at night, a million tiny colorful moons reflecting off our little river of a street. Every day he sits alone in his home office on the other side of the house facing the main road until dark, when the sun sets and the dark sets in and he sits in the dark lit up by his computer screen and then walks through the house and around the house turning on all the lights and makes dinner in the big open kitchen behind the big bay window with one of the larger trees, which has a nearly identical tree of just slightly smaller size situated precisely above it like an axis of cheer crossing the ceiling through the next floor up. That tree is the one he had last year, too, and the year before it, and usually he leaves it up for months into the new year. (Usually it’s just the one—the profusion of lights inside and outside is a new development, just for this year, or at least hasn’t been around when I’ve been in town, and I’m always not by now.)
This is my first winter break away from my family and my first winter break with my Cambridge family. Our roommate goes to work and my partner Cory goes to work a few days a week and I work remotely from home and occasionally go to the grocery store. We watch movies and TV shows and we cook elaborate meals and we undersleep and oversleep and stress out about work. We go for walks at least once a day on most days. Sometimes we drive around.
Here is our Christmas tree, which we got from Ricky’s Flower Market in Union Square. It is small, because our apartment is small and also because we are hoping that if it lives through the winter and the weight of the decorations we’ve burdened it with we might plant it someplace where it can live a good life.
Another cheerful Christmas thing we did was to send out Christmas cards. They looked like this:
—All very strange. It bothers me that the couples-jacuzzi one has the marshmallows literally skewered. Most menacing is the marshmallow face melted into the hot chocolate surrounded by little marshmallow body parts floating next to it, and more marshmallow body parts on the ground by the cup. (I am also bothered by the happy messages inside reflecting for the reader how lovely it is to spend Christmas with family, in a year when most people safely can’t.)
These aren’t the Christmas cards we ordered. Shortly before Christmas we got a Christmas card from Cory’s uncle, which was very classy and nice and made us very happy and also regretful that we had nothing prepared to send to give those same good feelings in return. We ordered some Christmas cards with cute animals on them. (I like to optimize and look at every option before making a choice, but Cory saw them and knew he liked them and we bought them right away without evaluating other options, which is a new feeling for me.) We got these instead. Cory decided that we should salvage the whole situation by including hot chocolate and stickers (two stamps for two ounces almost exactly!). They turned out nice.
The actual process was a very fun assembly line, perfect as a background task during a movie. It reminded me a lot of our lab’s holiday card assembly lines, only while doing them just the two of us I got to do every stage myself, which was fun. Cory writes pithy and clever messages that make people laugh. I write really long and heartfelt and far less funny messages, which takes a lot more time, signing some or most of the cards: “Wishing you and yours health, safety, love, cheer—and maybe even happiness.” Here is one early stage of our assembly line:
Christmas card giving seems to have increased this year, or at least it feels like it has. We got five Christmas cards! I am going to be using two of them as proof of residency for a parking permit. I do not think we usually get five Christmas cards.
The week before Christmas we had a magical snowstorm (like a foot of snow) and our first time shoveling cars and even sidewalks, which was great exercise and a lot of fun. It was the kind of snow that makes the sky pink at night and makes our usual streets feel unfamiliar and quiet and perfect, and everyone says hi when we pass each other even though we don’t usually do that and don’t know each other at all. I bought shovels the night before, and then I got up before sunrise and I got to spend most of the whole day outside, with breaks to get warm and change my socks and gloves. In the morning it was just me and the plows and the snow falling and the light beams from the plows made gorgeous lighthouse light beams through the dense snow falling. A few people were skiing. There was an incident with a FedEx truck that got stuck in the snow and shredded a parked car. I got to see a family of rats playing in the snow, which was actually delightful. It was overall an eventful day.
On Christmas Eve we went for a long walk during the day and again at night to look at everyone’s lights in our neighborhood and the nearby neighborhoods. We called our families and opened presents, then Cory made a lasagna by a new recipe and I fell asleep on the couch, and then he fell asleep and we burned the lasagna and that whole experience reminded me a bit much of undergrad. (We did end up trying what was between the top layer of burn and the bottom layer of burn and it must have been a very good lasagna.) The next day was warm and raining, which melted most of the remaining snow, and we had a lovely warm walk under the rain looking at lights in other neighborhoods and then when it got too cold and windy we went home and opened our presents to each other and made duck by another new recipe, which we did not burn and which turned out wonderfully, and watched Christmas movies and built wintry Lego sets. The day after we drove to a friend’s empty apartment for a change in environment and did a virtual Secret Santa with Cory’s friends from high school and looked at Christmas lights in another neighborhood. My Secret Santa got me a candle called Exhilarating, which in this case means peppermint and rosemary, a sugar scrub called Exhilarating, which in this case means peppermint, rosemary, coconut oil, almond oil, and shea butter and is apparently not edible despite tasting delicious, and honey and almond and olive oil soap that is not called Exhilarating—all very lovely smells, the former two of which give me the same good feeling as one time when I accidentally got mint toothpaste in my eye.
I really like American Christmas. I don’t think any of us expected it when we moved here, because Christmas in Russia (at least in the Orthodox church) happens on the Julian calendar two weeks later and is a purely religious holiday, and the usual Christmas things—the presents and the party and the tree with the lights on it—are all New Year’sthings to us. My mom likes to tell me that our first year in America, in Chicago, I, probably not yet fully speaking English but apparently already properly indoctrinated into the tradition of the American Christmas, was the one to pull the rest of the family into the proper ritual. On Christmas, which was going to be a regular day for us, I said: “But where are the presents? Aren’t we inviting everyone? Mom, don’t you know it’s Christmas?” Mom took me to the store and we picked out presents for the other recent Russian immigrant children living in our neighborhood, and we invited our small immigrant fold and had a lovely last-minute American Christmas party in Russian and everyone had a lovely time.
My most special memories of Christmas music in particular are from Chicago on an outdoor ice rink that doesn’t exist anymore, where I used to skate twice a week from right after school until late in the evening. My mom used to pick me up from school and drive me to the rink with dinner in a tupperware I’d eat on the drive while doing my homework, and then I had karate lessons sometimes and then a few hours of downtime on the rink, then skating lessons, then more skating until Mom was done with work and ready to pick me up, and sometimes she’d skate with me too. I loved skating. The rink was downtown, hidden from the road between tall buildings, and was never crowded even when the other rinks were. A lot of the time the staff played Christmas songs over the big outdoor speakers and sometimes the snow fell while I skated. Whenever I hear certain older Christmas songs that is what I think of, the snow falling and the cold air and the taste of blood from the cold and the pink sky and the tall Chicago downtown just barely darker than the night sky all around me and above me with its beautiful lights.
I miss my family, especially after Skype calls and missed messages that should be days and meals and adventures lived together in person. I just couldn’t justify risking the rest of our winters for this one.
The lesson, if there is one, I guess is to prioritize and be grateful for your health and the health of your loved ones and to make the best of what you have.
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The Christmas cards we actually bought were these. The Christmas cards we received were these, and the roll of stickers I bought was this one. It isn’t too late to send cards. You can say they got lost, or that you’re feeling Russian and your cards are meant to arrive by New Year’s.
If you like them, my Christmas lights are these, which I also own in Halloween colors, and my icicles are these. (I also really like these curtain lights, which I bought for my parents in off-white and for a friend in off-white and pink.) The combination of the icicles and colorful lights, reflecting off the wall and off and through the icicles, especially at night, gives a very nice effect of a snowy-rainy street in the winter, and makes it feel like there might be cozy snow and adventure outside even if the snow is melted or it’s raining instead. Bonus points if you arrange the lights around and behind winter Lego sets. Extra bonus points if you build the winter Lego sets while watching some classic American Christmas movies.
My parents got us skis, for which I’m counting down the days until our next big snowstorm (there were a few people skiing on the road in the early morning when it was just the plows and few adventurers and me). I got them a portable-ish pull-up bar that seemed pretty similar to ours, two cozy candles, and a wintry 3d puzzle and a salt-tree activity. Cory got me a book of Taylor Swift songs adapted to the piano, which I think I will just write the notes in because I still can’t sightread and life is too short to not play songs I want to play, and a watercolors and paper set with paper small enough to be a low-pressure art commitment, which is very important to me (unless I’m drawing something very special and fancy I always fold the page I’m drawing on in half first to make it less scary). Our friend in Florida sent us a box of starfruit from her backyard, which is a hilarious contrast to the weather here.
My Secret Santa asked for baking things and for a candle and said they like beach things, which in New England means something that got washed up and raked over the rocks in the cold, so I got them this driftwood candle and a danish dough whisk and a lame and a really exciting cookbook of bread recipes. Last winter Cory and I took a no-kneed baking class at Harvard that changed our lives, and the recipes from the class were based on those in that book. A lame is a special tool for carving designs into the bread, and is actually what gave away that I was that person’s Secret Santa—they were opening parts of the present and started opening the razors and I had to warn them that those were razors and to please not open them any further in a manner that was appropriate only for things that aren’t razors. (I also got Cory that same book and a lame, with a similar worry about the razors, and I’m very excited to try carving fancy patterns into our breads.)
This year’s present that I am most proud of was to two children of a close lifelong friend, one of whom I met when they were very young and one of whom I’ve only seen on Facebook. I got them a fancy hardcover Fortunately, the Milk by Neil Gaiman, which has absolutely gorgeous black-and-white illustrations, and crayons to color them with. A really good, funny book with beautiful illustrations is a very nice present, I think, especially if it comes with permission to color.
Here are ten nice presents to give to someone you’re not sure how to give presents to, perhaps because they’re your Secret Santa and you don’t know them that well:
Tiny notebooks. Everyone needs tiny notebooks. They can write down their ideas, or their todo lists, or five nice things that happened to them that day, or their unwritten novel. If you’d like, you can suggest things you think they might like to write, and they may or may not follow your suggestions. Texture is important here, and the line type and spacing. Get them something that is pleasant and interesting to hold and has classy thin lines or even a grid.
Nice inky pens. I like these pens, which are my favorites, for todo lists and fancy or important writing and art, and I like these pens, which I used to borrow from lab, for flowy-mind, lower pressure writing. It’s most important that the ink flows nicely. If the person you are shopping for has a favorite color that you know about, you can get them pens in their favorite color and they’ll probably like that.
Little circle sleds. A lot of adults in cities don’t have sleds, or space for sleds. I couldn’t find a satisfactory modern American version of the little butt sled I had as a kid (as well as an actual, much larger sled). A little butt sled is not as fun as a real sled but it’s very easy to store and transport, and is much better than having no sled at all. If you buy them several they can bring a friend or you can keep one.
Nice candles and fancy soaps. A nice way to gift a smell. Texture is also valuable here, albeit secondary. It’s nice to get them something varied and interesting, like a soap with little oats in it or a candle with coffee beans on the sides. Take care not to get anything containing lavender or tea tree oil (which is sad because I love tea tree oil, and still use it even though I know I shouldn’t) if the product is meant to go on the skin.
A star finder, which can tell you what stars are in the sky at any given moment. (Stellarium is even better, but not as portable.)
Hot chocolate, which almost everyone likes and which is apparently available online mostly in absurd quantities. (If they don’t like hot chocolate, they definitely at least like someone who does.)
A book you really like, maybe with a custom bookmark you drew or post-it notes on your favorite pages with some notes on why you liked that part. Don’t write in the book itself, maybe, in case they don’t like it and want to sell it later.
A nice teacup, maybe with a little saucer for it. My grandmother on my mom’s side sometimes gives me nice teacups. They all make me very happy every time I want to feel fancy, and someday maybe I’ll have tea parties. I like to occasionally gift people flowering tea. Tea is a low-stress gift you can give a person lots of times, which is nice.
A nice potted plant that is not too likely to die soon. Plants are nice. Bonus points if you made or decorated the pot, or if you put some special rocks from a special beach or haunted warehouse or other special destination on the surface of the soil, or if the plant is a clipping from a larger plant of yours that you particularly like or particularly don’t like or if the soil contains the ashes of their enemies, delivered as a message of goodwill for the coming new year and a release of your debts. Hopefully they don’t think of the plant as a metaphor for your relationship.
Here are ten things you probably shouldn’t give people:
A copy of your dissertation, probably—especially if you don’t know that person that well, especially if that person is not your thesis advisor or otherwise on your committee (because if they are your thesis advisor or otherwise on your committee then a copy of your dissertation would actually be a very good present).
A book you don’t like, with a note saying you do like it, with the absolute worst and most boring parts highlighted—with real highlighter marks so they can’t resell it to buy something nicer.
Their dissertation, with lots of comments in red—especially if they’ve already graduated but still have nightmares about grad school.
Pencils with the lead pre-broken inside, probably.
Someone else’s dissertation.
A plane ticket, given the pandemic.
A surprise visit (or any kind of visit), given the pandemic.
A blank notebook with “Your Dissertation” written on the cover. In fact, I find this potential gift so distasteful and cruel that I made one really quick that you can buy online. Here are two blank notebooks (click the images), one with “Your Dissertation” written on the cover and one with “Your Thesis” written on the cover:
You can also get them as clocks or drink coasters if that would upset you more, or magnets or stickers or postcards or t-shirts or mugs or laptop cases or clothes for your child or blankets and pillows to hug at night or the smallest zipper bag.
Live bugs, like 1000 mealworms or 1500 ladybugs (pretty much the only thing worse than a blank notebook with “Your Dissertation” written on the cover).
Wishing you and yours health, safety, love, cheer—and maybe even happiness.
L. A. K. 