Warm and Fuzzy Holiday Mammories

Marisol, Kristin and Lisa mug it up on Christmas Day. Note my holiday bowl full o' jelly. Love me, love my tummy!

The Holiday Hot Sisters in Full Effect. Dear god, I am tired.

HI Y'ALL!!!

What a week. To the lovely people at the Starbucks on 23rd and Park, I tip my hat in gratitude. You make it all worthwhile. And those folks at the Bux on Steinway Street in Astoria? Cheers to you as well. Without you and all that scrumptiously rich Free Trade Christmas Blend you pour down my eager throat every day (not unlike a baby bird receiving nourishment from its mother), I would not have made it through this week of holiday high jinks.

My week consisted mostly of travel, cooking, (oddly tolerable) family togetherness, and diffusing the occasional outburst of an overstimulated, undernapped 4-year-old whose present-opening and cookie-intake levels became so dangerously high that her behavior began to mirror that of someone who'd smoked too much meth.

I've been "working" but not really--just catching up on my bloggin' and YouTubin'. Also been trying to binge on celebrity gossip, because as of Midnight tonight I am going cold turkey, and I cannot imagine what tomorrow will look like without my daily feed of Britney, Nicole and Mischa. But No More. No more Perez (I'm sorry, baby!), Gawker, Defamer, Us Weekly, Star...gone, all gone. My January 2nd workday will begin with a bran muffin, a deep yogic breath and a glance at NYTimes.com. It's a new dawn, a new day...I have subscribed to Yoga Journal and Body + Soul magazines in the hopes of redirecting my insatiable need for glossy mag consumption down a more constructive/healthy road. We'll see, folks.

So now there's that strange post-holiday letdown that seeps out like a virus all over the city; I've spent the last week in lala land, suspended in this vacuum of little responsibility or consequence, freewheelin' all over this foreign New York--the New York that, in the hands of friendly, warm, camera-totin' tourists, becomes more like Dollywood than Manhattan. I hate to admit, as a fully invested, card-carrying New Yorker, that I kind of like this New York, but it's kind of like being on vacation without ever having to leave home. But now all the pretty lights come down and the gawky midwesterners decamp and New York once again insulates itself in its giant Pashmina of paranoia and sedate resentment. And everything is as it should be.