Pushkin.

Christmas is one week away.

And how am I celebrating?

With restraint and circumspection.

In the Gladwell family, we do a mid-century modern Christmas,

spare, elegant, minimalist.

Lots of the baby Jesus in a tasteful Scandinavian leather and rosewood manger.

No Santa, no reindeer, no elves.

Not so for my colleague, Ben Nadav Haff-Hafrey.

The Gladwells impose a dollar limit on gifts, like price controls in some socialist state,

the Nadafi's spend months thinking of what to get one another.

The glabbles buy a tree at the last moment and would be happier if we could just move the whole operation outside

around the Douglas Pine in the backyard.

Ben's family has a tree,

a little model village covered in snow, and his father's vintage electric train set, plus a little metal tree with ornaments that's up year-round. So when I told Ben that I had never watched,

it's a wonderful life, he was stunned.

Then he reached out to me, as the Good Samaritan did to the traveler lying bereft by the side of the road.

How could this be? he asked me gently.

Because, as you can imagine, within the Dadaf Hafries, It's a Wonderful Life is a sacred text.

Then Ben told me another story

about what in his mind

is an even more important Christmas tale.

...