Magical Holiday Thinking

December 16 and I don't have a single Christmas decoration up. I'm strangely not bothered. I was going to put my kitschy bubble-light candle in the front window, but I need an extension cord and seem to have only one, which is in use for the TV-digital-cable-box-VCR-DVD-player conglomeration in another room. I really should get a surge protector for in there. I used to have one of those. Where is it?

So no bubble light in the window yet to help cheer the neighborhood. Eh -- whatever.

Odd coming from someone who used to love Christmas so. I stopped loving the "season" the way I used to sometime in the last few years. It feels a lot healthier to me -- in terms of both pre-holiday stress and post-holiday blues -- to view Christmas as one day out of the year, maybe two if you count Christmas Eve, which I've always liked a lot more than the day itself anyway.

In my immediate family -- consisting of two eightysomething parents and four fortysomething "kids" and assorted spouses and offspring -- we now officially allow everyone to give whatever gifts cause the least anxiety and economic hardship to the giver. We love one another and want to partake in the spirit of the holiday, but we all have our own lives, after all, and who really knows what a fortysomething sibling needs or wants? We're too busy to ask, let alone shop!

If the new rule means giving "raisins and some money" -- to invoke a piece of "family shorthand" (a term Joan Didion uses in her book The Year of Magical Thinking, which I'm currently in the middle of; that is, she uses the term "family shorthand," not "raisins and some money") -- then that's fine. If it means baking cookies for everyone, that's fine. If it means buying the same generic item (candles! chunky bars of unusually scented soap! -- part of my presents to everyone last year) or a gift certificate to the same store, that's fine. If it means going through the traditional rigmarole of buying original, pricey, store-bought gifts, making sure they're all equal in value down to the last dollar, that's . . . just fine. The byword: low stress.

I was telling a colleague about all of this at lunch earlier this week at the fantastic restaurant Zaytinya, and she e-mailed me the next day to tell me she admired the idea and thought it was "revolutionary." Eh, whatever.