Edition #105: Christmas at a Tiki Bar
Plus, my husband and I don't speak the same love language, Manhattan's craziest-looking apartment, and some animal photos
A Note From the Editor
It was Christmas eve and I was drunk and sweaty, knife in hand. We had spent an exorbitant amount of money buying fresh oysters at the fish market on the corner where all the cute guys worked—we imagined them fishermen, gruff and unfriendly, but they were really just Brooklynites. Despite the fancy knife and the YouTube tutorials ensuring us it was simple, we couldn’t figure out how to slide the sharp edge of the knife into “the ridge” of the oyster. My two best friends were relegated to murdering the lobsters that had been crawling around on the kitchen counter and driving the dog crazy. They screeched and giggled as I jammed the knife into the side of the shell with too much force—careless, really, because I didn’t have health insurance at the time.
Familiar Christmas music crooned in the background, I wanted to pull my hair out. Another friend showed up with a bottle of natural wine. We discovered we had recently been on the same date with the same guy at the same bar. He wore overalls both times and bragged to each of us about how well he flosses his teeth. We laughed and cringed and eventually, finally, I felt the edge of the knife slide between the two halves of the stubborn shell. We all screamed; a shared victory for a task we began to think was impossible. I said I was the dad of the family and by the end of the night, I’d taught all three of my daughters how to shuck oysters. It only took one of us doing it to realize it was possible, and then it became easy.
This was the start of my first Christmas in New York.
By the time December rolled around last year, I was tired. I spent the entire month of September alone in a beautiful little alpine town in France, and from the moment I got back to New York, it was go, go, go—a wedding, a birthday, a massive life change, a new career to start, a full week of family time for Thanksgiving, another birthday (to kick off the season of all of my friends turning 30), and what felt like a hundred dates stuffed between. I had planned to go back to Florida for Christmas, the same as I did every year. But when I unpacked my suitcase from one of the aforementioned birthday trips midway through December, I knew there was no way I could board another plane in 2021.
Though this wasn’t uncommon among my peers, the thought of being in the city for the holiday depressed me. Christmas was a big deal for us growing up, and in my adult life, the joy of the holiday was extended by experiencing it through the eyes of my nieces and nephews. Over the course of the past few years, I would spend the holiday at various siblings’ houses, observing the traditions they practiced with their children—reindeer food out on the lawn, gingerbread men decorating, drive-in movies. Though none of us were stringently religious, we were traditionalists when it came to the holiday. We claimed it was for the children but really it was for us, too.
On the morning of my New York Christmas, I woke with the faintest of hangovers. Instead of the fluffy white snow I’d wished for, the sky was gray and damp. Our skeleton Christmas crew—three girls, one dog—had had a sleepover, and we rose early to meet our morning obligation, delivering meals to homebound seniors. We drove all around Brooklyn and gained a new appreciation for delivery people in New York, for getting access to each building was an impossible feat. Some deliveries left me feeling empty—a darkened apartment, a tired-looking man alone—but others made me feel alive. In one building, we knocked and knocked on a door for so long a neighbor stuck her head out. Another neighbor, hearing the commotion, stuck her head out. The two women began talking about what they were cooking for dinner that night, one woman asked the other if she could use her oven. We waited for our meal recipient to open her door, for we were instructed not to leave the meal if no one answered. When the two women down the hall realized what we were doing, delivering their elderly neighbor a meal, one of them looked at us and said, “You don’t have to worry about that, honey. We’re going to feed her good today.”
I loved Christmas just the way it was, the way it has always been, bustling with chaos and finished with a dose of pomp and circumstance. Matching pajamas, an ornate breakfast, my sister and I buying family-sized boxes of the two best Christmas cereals and eating heaping bowls of them, mixed, every day for a week straight (or until we ran out, which usually came first). Before, I had felt quietly sorry for those who stayed behind in the city over the holidays, even if they claimed they didn’t mind or that they preferred it. I assumed they simply had nowhere else to be, or that they didn’t crave their family’s company the way I did.
When we’d finally delivered all of the meals, we were sleepy and starving and on the brink of grumpy. I made eggs benedict the way my dad always had on Christmas morning. We lit candles for the table. Afterwards, I called my dad on a whim to tell him how breakfast turned out. It was the first time in my 29 years of life the two of us had ever spoken on the phone, and our ten-minute conversation was sweet and simple. I couldn’t believe I’d been so afraid to speak to him in such an intimate manner, before. Everything felt easy that day, a bonus. We were freed of expectations, just three friends choosing togetherness in a new format, figuring it out.
At my insistence, no gifts were exchanged, so after breakfast, we had nothing we needed to do. One friend took a nap, I cuddled with the dog and my other friend and we binged the first season of Euphoria. I had chips for lunch. When the sun began to set, we walked to the movie theater to see Spielberg’s West Side Story. My friends had no idea what the movie was about—baffling to me, a former theater kid—and they would giggle uncomfortably every time one of the characters began to sing. Afterward, we ordered a feast of Chinese food for pick up. While we waited, we walked into an empty tiki bar in Williamsburg. My heavy Doc Martens crunched over the sandy floor of the bar, we hung out winter coats and ordered ridiculous, sugary cocktails from the only waiter/bartender in the place. He pretended not to notice when my friend began to cry, recounting a recent heartbreak, and we pretended not to notice when he began to quietly read lines aloud from a printed script, his body angled away from us. I thought: I hope he gets the part. I wondered how he would remember this Christmas, whether we would be a part of his memory of the day the way he would be a part of ours.
If you were to pass the bar from the outside, here’s what you would’ve seen: Three girls, laughing and crying and sucking down thick, neon-colored frozen drinks with little umbrellas perched on the sides. One waiter/bartender, having a private conversation with himself in the corner. You might think it sad, this scene, had you not known us. But there was something electric happening in that bar, something warm and unintentionally rebellious. And in our own ways, I like to think we were all content.
I think of this day often, anytime I feel myself beginning to panic over the expectations of how I am supposed to live my life at this juncture, as a single woman nearing 30-years-old. I consider the truth: There will always be expectations set forth by precedent, there will always be the way things have been done. But there will also always be options—to redefine traditions, to make them fit for my life instead of forcing myself to fit into someone else’s. It’s easy to forget these options exist, that the world is huge and full of people choosing to do things their own way. I always find those people the most interesting, anyway.
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Cheers, my dears, and as always, thanks for reading. If you read this newsletter every week and haven’t yet opted for a paid subscription, I hope you’ll consider it! Paid subscribers allow me to keep this thing going, buying me the time needed to read, write, edit, and curate content each week. If you’re unable to go paid at this time, I still sincerely appreciate your readership.
As a reminder, free subscribers will continue getting the intro essay each week, and the full edition (essay + content) the first and last week of every month. Paid subscribers will get the full edition each week. Thank you, happy almost Spring, and as a friend instructed me via text this morning, “turn up the music extra loud and dance it out for 3 minutes or more.”