LET IT SNOW

Having raised two boys to men during the first act of my life and helped raise two rescue tot girls for the second, I am well acquainted with the well-populated Christmas/Chanukah house.

For the record, I celebrated both holidays, wanting my Jewish kids to feel a part of the Christmas spirit. They were informed early on that Christmas was a pagan ritual which was co-opted by the Catholic Church in order to entice potential worshippers. There was no religion attached. Just joy.

And now, here I am, back in my native New York, all these post-Los Angeles years later, pretty much home alone for the holidays.

But that does not mean I am lonely.

What most people outside of New York don’t get is that Manhattan is a welcoming, bursting with pride small town with a small town mentality.

It’s basically a mash-up of Metropolis and Smallville all rolled up into one. Those who immigrated here no doubt came from small towns as well and once here, unpacked their intimate way of life.

We live on top of each other, millions of rainbow-colored Jenga pieces happily stacked and glued firmly in place by our mutual love of now and then, topped by the cherry of all the sundaes of tomorrows.

During the holidays, the entire island naturally morphs into the shape of a giant Christmas Tree and the city twinkles like a million and one love-struck hearts.

We can legitimately call ourselves Tinsel Town East.

Stuart, my dear LA (the other Tinsel Town) friend, corn-fed with a big fat business account, arrived on my Hudson River shores over the weekend and invited me to spend a few days with him in his corn-fed big fat Fifth Avenue boutique hotel suite, which was right across the street from the cement lion protected New York Public Library. Swank.

So I Metro-Northed my way into town and just like that my life was the interior of a snow globe without the shaking. LA wins in the shaking contest. I used to think that there should be an LA-based cereal called Earthquaker Oats.

Grand Central lives up to its name. It is like a Vanderbilt shined and buffed diamond, bursting at the seams with people who are doing what most of us don’t do most of the time: stare up at the night sky, bedazzled.

We do that when we are tourists. When we are on vacation, even if it’s a staycation, without thinking we naturally tour every conceivable dimension, including the infinite heavens, in this case, the simulated one that hovers over Grand Central. There is no visible commerce in the main arena, other than the one incandescent red Apple logo which could easily be a substitute for the logo of our very own big apple. The Apple store is craftily masked by marble banisters and a winding staircase.

When I was a kid, I worked in the old soot-covered not so Grand Central Station and it was as dark as a fairy tale in there.

Now, thanks to Jackie Onassis, who spear-hearted its resurrection, the ghosts of old New York have a lovely house to fly through.

Grand Central perfectly encapsulates all of New York. On one level it is Intensity Central, where HUSTLE meets rushing BUSTLE, which are the two main ingredients of the blood of the native New Yorker. My dad’s name was Murray, and one of my all-time favorite girlfriends, Grace, nicknamed me, “Hurry, Worry, Son of Murray” and that could not be more accurate.

Even if something is six-inches away, we New Yorkers are in a hurry to get there and move on to the next, immediate goal-oriented task. We talk fast. Eat fast. Think fast. My family Thanksgivings (and this is no exaggeration) from beginning to end clocked in at around 13-14 minutes.

Our hearts pulse-pound like a just arriving and just as fast leaving subway car which is why we all boast that we are on the fast track.

We relax by not relaxing. We live the lives of obsessed/possessed Good Will Hunting mathematicians who are trying round the clock to figure out the equation of life.

Few things slow us down.

Baseball, by its very nature, is one of those rare things which forces us to move at a nine-inning snail’s pace. It’s our version of chess. We chat amiably with our neighbors, casually cheer and jeer like attending royalty while way too many of us stare lovingly at our cellphones like they are our cherished newborns.

But come the last third of the game, especially if we are losing by any margin, we are suddenly refueled with a massive jolt of adrenaline, like we just downed eight Vente-sized cups of Starbucks and just like that we are racing towards our cars, like a sea of lunatics during an end of the world evacuation.

The other thing that slows us down is Christmas.

It’s the only time when we actually acknowledge the presence of a tree. I’m talking about the one in Rockefeller Center, a place which we blithely pass all year long. And typical of us it has to be THAT big to catch our eye.

New York during the holidays, for we men, transforms itself into a crafty seductress, like a giant Rita Hayworth in a slithery, silk-slinky nightgown, who under normal circumstances would not give us the time of day, but during these few spare, weeks, suddenly we’re all that she wants.

It is come hither time and we are all in.

And just like that we turn eggnog daffy, reduced to not very bright teenage boys, whose only thought is how come we have no thoughts?

We are temporarily pine fume happy. Engaged by wonderstruck tourists who are just as engaged as they are on any Disneyland ride.

We stop and gander at gaily decorated store windows and our normally fragile, heavily bruised, combustible hearts become tiny tugboats being dragged out to the furthest reaches of the sea of enchantment by a formidable battleship, which feels just like the days when our long lost moms and dads vice gripped our small, mittened hands and lead us safely to points unknown.

There is a profound sense of trust that lingers in the New York air at Christmas. We are enshrined. Protected. Personal politics melt on contact, like the brief life of a just fallen snowflake. We carry carols like freshly incubated babies who require nothing more than tender lullabies.

In the back of our minds, we think about the needy, the frail, the broken, the recently departed.

We think about how long it’s been since we became orphaned.

And when that tear filled thought cloud arrives, that is when the universe assigns a set of surrogate parents to us, a pair of invisible angels, who silent night tend to us and makes us feel adored.

While I was in the city I had dinner at the restaurant One If By Land, Two If By Sea in the matrix of the West Village which, in 1767 was Aaron Burr’s carriage house and it was sublime and elegantly dressed for the holidays.

At our table was a lovely group of people who under any other circumstance I would never have met, but the spirit of the moment commandeered us and it was a lovely pow wow, with plenty of wine filled peace pipes to go round.

There is nothing better in New York than to linger in the real estate of ghosts.

I visited my other shrine: the Rose Reading Room that lives deep within the belly of the New York Public Library. Forget silent night. It’s silent all the time in there and it’s lovely to enjoy the kind of hush that is all over the world.

The ingenuity of quiet becomes an act of reverence which immediately reminds you of the origins of respect. It feels like the walls are impenetrable and can keep out the ravages of time and discourse. Should you have a lapse of locally enforced allegiance, a simple haughty shush by a library employee snaps you right back to attention.

This is yet another magnificently sky topped room which, when you sit below the ceiling clouds of the Rose, you feel like there is nothing between you and the Gods of literature. Whispers with fluttering butterfly wings are the only form of transmission. Thoughts soar like eagles. Dreams hatch like easter eggs. Words become bejeweled and turn into instantly converted, priceless currency.

Christmas in New York is literally timeless.

It’s the only time where we are consciously aware and fully welcoming of the magical convergence of past, present and future.

It is a privileged existence. An infinite middle-class menu of delight.

And yes, it is certainly indulgent and wildly unrealistic.

Everything is overpriced, overabundant and as deep as the Rockette show at Radio City Music Hall.

But it is also well deserved.

We who work as hard as we do, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, who are victimized and pummeled by exasperating, BREAKING NEWS, who spend way too much of our time debating, arguing or trying to prove just how right we are, have earned this time travel pilgrimage back the world that smells like fresh baked pumpkin pie and potpourri, where people are emphatically kind and rosy-cheeked, and everyone is simply exhausted from the deeply committed, non-stop job of having fun.

And will remain onboard this rollicking, ChristmasExpress of memory to the very last countdown seconds of the year when time, the Catholic School Nun of life, will evict the merriment right out of us.

And just like that, we will once again be quarantined by responsibility.

But until we get there, let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

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