Holiday Cards

Or, the cha-cha is no more ridiculous than life itself.

Everyone has a version of themselves that they dream of being. One version of myself who hovers perpetually out of my reach is She Who Sends Holiday Cards Reliably to People She Cares About.

I am not that person. I am beginning to accept that I will never be that person. The Katherine who sends holiday cards reliably to people she cares about hovers in the ether of some twisted branch of the multiverse, surrounded by electric machine elves bathed in the ichor of human experience and she also remembers to take the batteries out of the window candles when she puts them away, safely, and all together, in a place she will remember, to be ready for next year.

(This is a scene from one of my favorite underrated holiday films, Metropolitan, from 1990, in which a group of overeducated New York teenagers make it through debutante season in the 1980s. From this scene derives the subtitle of today’s newsletter. “I don’t read novels,” one character says to another. “I prefer to read good literary criticism.”)

I used to practice defensive holiday cards. This is a method, of my own design, which entails stocking up on a supply of charming Marblehead woodcut cards showing snowy New England scenes and lobster traps, and then sending one to the return address of any holiday card that arrives at my house. This method worked passing well for many years - decades, even. But then Litchman’s and Orne finally went out of business. My heart wept, both because I enjoyed the store’s seeming invulnerability to the passage of time, but also because now what was I going to do, about holiday cards?

Answer: nothing.

Answer, version 2 in the multiverse: outsource to my husband.

Answer, version 3 in the multiverse: start a Substack.

So what’s next?

Because after starting out as Juliette Lewis, and then spending many fruitful years as Julia Louis-Dreyfus, I am now full-on Beverly d’Angelo, the holiday festivities in my home begin tonight, followed shortly by the arrival of houseguests and a succession of activities in matching pajamas. I hope that you and yours have a festive, restful, and joyous holiday season. Don’t forget - Chinese restaurants are open on Christmas Day. And everybody loves Chinese food by a roaring fire.

I’ll have a few book events bubbling up here and there in the new year, though my major task will be writing, as a few different book ideas have been warring for supremacy in the months since The Penguin Book of Pirates came out, and A True Account released in paperback. The time has almost come to actually write one, or both, or even all three of them. More on that when the time comes.

Until then, please accept this holiday card, such as it is, from the version of me who is living here, in this moment. The version who took solace in the fact that the last line spoken in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, shortly after a huge explosion has sent the plastic lawn Santa rocketing across the moon and after the police have broken up a melee instituted by armed kidnapping and economic disaster, Clark Griswold, who wanted a good wholesome traditional family Christmas, looks into the night sky and smiles and says “I did it.”