Like we did last Christmas… and the Christmas before… and the Christmas before…
This weekend marks my annual Holiday Stroll with Kira. I think it’s our sixth or seventh, maybe even our eighth, and clearly no one’s counting. It’s become one of my favorite holiday excursions, whenever we manage to do it, and every year we seem to add a few new components while doing our best to maintain a couple of traditions. One mainstay is the viewing of ‘The Man Who Came to Dinner‘ – an old Bette Davis film set at Christmas time. At one point, while ice skating, they purchase a pair of ‘hot sweets’ – apparently baked sweet potatoes were once sold like hot dogs at a baseball game. As a nod to that scene, we bake a few in the oven and pause the movie when the skating part comes on to try them. We are invariably disappointed and left wondering what all the fuss is about, but we do it for the ritual.
Another tradition is a bowl of soup, preferably pho, and often somewhere in Chinatown. The latest thing we’ve added is a walk in Cambridge, from Porter Square to Harvard usually, where we peruse a couple of Tibetan stores and find something warm to wear.
The one year I did a full-blown and intricately-detailed itinerary was a year when it rained on the parade, throwing the entire minute-by-minute production into a chaotic shambles. Since then, I’ve avoided such intensive planning. This whole tradition began on a whim, and is best executed in the same manner. I can’t wait to see where this year’s takes us…
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