It's a Freezy Rain Christmas!

'Twas a Chinese-food Christmas, and all through the newsroom, editors worked their pages with a blasé, food-coma, attempting-to-finesse gloom.

Last night I attended a loosely arranged Julefest, complete with a long-snouted marzipan pig and a spindly-armed tinsel tree. I'm too broccolied-out to explain whither-the-pig. Google it if you need to.

In needing-to-vent news, I was amazed at the audacious snootiness* of someone I met this weekend, who asked every question with a knife-sharp edge of condescension and pretended not to be listening to a conversation until you addressed her directly, and even then she only barely responded, so great was her need to continue to disdain those around her. [Eyes subtly flutter. Like a tiny, eye-sized hummingbird. Two of them.] She was a bee-yute, in the old-fashioned carnival huckster sense of the word. These people…these…humans.

In needing-to-vent-further news, as a Jew in New York, I'm on overload with all the "Jew in New York" Christmas stories in this weekend's papers, specifically in the New York Times. I understand the hegemony of the "Jews With Trees" movement maybe better than most, and still I'm a little up to my ears in all the remarkable! unveiling of this new! phenomenon! in the past couple of days. Why am I surprised, why do I even surmise?

In the News of the Children front, a friend told me tonight about the gentleness of his 4-year-old nephew. This story plays out with pirate and Viking dolls.

"Let's go steal their treasure!" my friend said to his nephew.

"No, we'll ask to borrow their treasure," the little boy corrected. A face-to-face negotiation ensued.

"Excuse me, Viking. Can we please borrow some of your treasure?"

"I don't know," Signor Viking told Monsieur Pirate. He then proceeded to gravely consider the matter. "Hmmm, ok. You can borrow a little."

In the world-rights-itself-with-a- delicate-bubbly-and-whimsical-Small- Child-story non-news from a sort-of-Jew-who-does-not-have- a-tree-but-whose-sister-does, merry all of it, and goodnight. [Wait, first enjoy these photos by NYT's Fred R. Conrad. New York in all its camel-faced, tiny-tourist-skating glory.]

[Grand, orchestral hyphenated- flourish…and fin.]

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*Different from "snouty."