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It’s Christmas tomorrow. I don’t know how that’s possible but it is.

You’d think it’d be easy for me to keep track of, especially considering my birthday is five days before, but in some ways that makes it harder. My parents—they got that it could be hard for a kid to have a birthday so close to a big holiday. It was hard to have any kind of celebration with fellow kids, what with most of them being with family for the holidays and what not. 

But thankfully, my parents were never very religious, so Christmas didn’t need to be a huge deal. Mostly we would bake and eat and I’d get presents on my birthday, not Christmas. And then with Harry, well, I’d try to cook some of my favorite holiday dishes that my mom made—yorkshire puddings and hollandaise sauce and all those delicious fatty things that stick to your ribs—but inevitably the ingredients we had access to would lead to some very lackluster meals, especially with me at the stove. 

Harry’s Jewish anyway, so she would mostly let me do whatever I wanted on Christmas. She likes the…the frippery of it, she said. New York at Christmastime, fancy shop windows, roasted nuts on street carts, garlands everywhere, that kind of stuff. But, unlike everything else in our lives, it wasn’t something she had a strong opinion about, so it usually fell to me to decorate or bring in the holiday cheer if I wanted it. 

When it came to celebrating any holidays—Christmas, Hanukkah, Thanksgiving, Yom Kippur, Halloween, whatever—we were sporadic at best. Sometimes it was nice to give the months and years some shape and sometimes we’d look up and realize it was mid-December and we’d missed all the fall holidays. 

Birthdays were the only things we were consistent on. It helped that mine is in December and Harry’s is in June. A nice six month gap to give us a good rhythm. 

Anyway, I was planning on leaving for LA today but then when I realized…well, a Christmas in Vegas sounds as good as a Christmas anywhere else. At least here I’ve got good champagne and scattered access to a working record player. Maybe I can even dig up some holiday records. 

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