A Very Chindian Christmas to you all

A very Happy Christmas to all our reader(s) out there. We have a biblical deluge of rain here in northern New Jersey, making for a wet and gray day, which fits our mood. 

We're a Jew after all, but we did grow up celebrating Christmas.  The many, many Hindus here in Chindia celebrate as well. It's ok.  Your memories are our memories, sleepless Christmas eves, euphoric Christmas mornings. Our best presents were the Navarone Mountain army playset in '80, Coleco Vision in '82, and a Donruss Mattingly rookie in '88. Oh, there was that one Christmas when we were dating Mrs. Stroock and we...Heh.

Since the deaths of our mother and grandfather in 2018, Mrs. Stroock takes the Strocoklettes to see her father in Indiana. Christmas 2018, the less said the better. We spent Christmas 2019 at home by ourselves. Which was fine. We drank and smoked and binged Star Wars. Because of the Wuflu the family is together at home this year. This is the first Christmas in which the girls haven't gone anywhere.

We're not doing much today and plan on Chinese for dinner. It's a Jewish thing with roots going all the way back to British Prime Minister Benjamin D'Israeli, who liked to dine with Gladstone over a  pu-pu platter. We have Soviet-Jewish neighbors who celebrate Soviet Christmas. The commies just moved it to new years. They have a tree and Grandfather Frost brings presents to good communist boys and girls.

Last night we watched Polar Express with the Stroocklettes. We loath the film. It's over-produced, sentimental pap that tries way too hard. Polar Express is also creepy as hell.

These days we get nostalgic for Christmas morn. From 1983 till 2002 we spent almost every Christmas in Livermore, Kentucky with our mother's family. You set us on the couch with all of our cousins, slap a John Deer hat on us, no one would know better and folks would assume our darker complexion was the result of a lot of last minute work outside.

After our aunt died in early 2003(our grandmother's sister and matriarch of the Henry/Thomason family), we did Christmas at The Algonquin. The family dined at the actual author's roundtable and we're the best writer to sit there in generations. Anyway our grandfather loved the hotel. His grandfather would take him up to the George Washington Bridge construction site and then lunch at The Algonquin. Mark Stroock II was a well known fixture there till his death in 2018. 

The old bastard is 94 there. He needed in-home care but had his brains and could get around. His second wife died the year before. Frankly, we were wondering what he was waiting for. It was his last Christmas. We all knew it, so did he. Which is why we whipped out our phone and recorded that.