Since I know you'd be confused with a Christmas card that had a picture of a Nativity scene on it instead of a picture of the person or family who sent you the card, I've kept to these same social stipulations: Merry Christmas--here's a picture of me.
Nothing against people who go to all the work and expense of sending out self-portrait Christmas cards--I recognize the effort and the opportunity to tell people how you're doing, and I've received several already this season from family and friends I value highly--but the guys who grew up with the ambition of recreating the scene of Christ's birth on a Christmas card are out of work. So all those cards I bought back in the 90's and never used?--they're good for Christmas decorations around the house, but that's it. You think you can still use them, save some money by simply inserting a family pic, and be considered just as hip as your neighbor? You're wrong. No longer can you add yourself to the card; you have to be the card. So anyway, here's an e-Christmas card. The printers and tree-cutters aren't making a dime on this either. Merry Christmas.
Borsch is the remedy to whatever ails me . . . when it's done right. And my mom--she done it right. I haven't tasted this fulfillment of man's desire since last I tasted Borsch in Russia six years ago. Many an artist has tried her hand at recreating the love I lost in leaving, heaven knows I couldn't do it, but tonight it has returned. My genius mother in all her culinary glory reinvented the wheel so long confined to Russian kitchens, and I partook of moments lived by a 19 and 20 year-old Joseph--my other childhood. For childhood it is when suddenly new senses replace the five you knew before. If a man is to all at once see and smell and feel and hear and taste new matter as I did in Russia, he abandons the former and is again a child, or else he loses his senses. I chose to acquire the new. Yet lose my senses is what I almost did upon returning home, I loved the new set so intensely. And every time I managed to inspire efforts at awakening the new set sleeping, I only roused the dead, irritated a man in slumber. Each bowl of Borsch stung worse than if I'd left it untouched. It was soup--just soup, no matter what they called it. And then tonight! My mother made it live! The unused flavors meshed with unused taste awoke the unused senses lost to memory. I was in Russia again. I couldn't even be tempted with dessert until my taste buds cooled. It was that real. My mother is a genius, she really is.
