Drew

I write Christmas Day, but for writing purposes we will pretend it is 11:49 PM Christmas Eve. My Cinnamon Rolls failed to proof properly. We cooked the yeast with melted butter, or, our kitchen was too cold for the yeast to activate. Whichever case, tomorrow they will bake into tough, unsharable rolls like from that Christmas when my dad microwaved them instead of using the oven.

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Christmas Eve morning began successfully with breakfast by the tree. Snow fell over Port Richmond. The tree decked out with sparse ornaments and my grandfather’s old chili lights from New Mexico. We cut it down ourselves at a tree farm in Limerick, Pennsylvania. 

I took the trolley in to work to arrive at the book store I run around 10.Swept the store, attempted the Post Office (an early failure, essentially closed). Snow clouds cleared around opening at 11, a good thing for business I thought, though I would have enjoyed it if the snow had kept falling.

Last-minute shoppers trickled in, then rushed in, finally trickling out around 2. One of the season’s main sales highlight came early when we sold a First Edition “Lolita” in the morning. I’d watched two sides of a couple plot around buying it all December, and finally they did. The copy itself came from a surprisingly successful book sale I’d attended in the Fall. I’d almost not gone because it required me to close the store for a couple hours, but I decided you never know, and I’d managed to find several modern Firsts among some other things.

It was bittersweet moment locking the doors. Most years at the shop, the week before Christmas has a lot of new and old friends coming by, plus all the neighbors, family, and old clients. I get to show off my shop and prove to all the past acquaintences that saw me ride around on a bicycle for so many years that I am neither dead nor sentenced to community service.

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Philadelphia is quiet like some punctuation. Holidays – SEPTA, really – in Philadelphia give me that feeling a friend of mine one joked about “I miss the old Philadelphia where no matter where you were, it was the wrong place to be.” My girlfriend meets me at the store as I close up shop and we walk down to the El. There is no one out on Girard Ave, and only a smattering of people waiting on the train platform. Amongst the stray holiday commutters and subway strugglers are two men up to some inscrutable scheme of doubtful payoff. “There is no dark side of the moon,” says the lookout.  

Well, shit! Downtown things are decidedly festive. Christmas Village is crowded, the line for a Love statue photo, long. I forgot that there even was a portal to Ireland here as we gawked at the alpaca poncho with an eagle on it, and the nativity scenes carved into vinyl records. 

Our main destination is the Wanamaker Christmas light show. Built in 1955, the show runs several times a day with recorded narration from Julie Andrews and a screen 5 stories tall of light-up Christmas characters which in tandem perform a medley of the “Nutcracker” and “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.” 

The kitsch of the show and the awesome pipes of the country’s largest pip organ are my favorite pairing. We scramble for a spot for a 4 PM showing. First we try the ground floor, but after 5 minutes craning our necks at the blank light show we run up two broken escalators to get eye level with our beloved light up bears and train. The screen come on. The crowd grows quiet. The music starts, but the volume is as loud as a phone speaker. Julie Andrews narration begins as a baby cries. The 4 PM Macy’s Christmas Light Show: A Philadelphia Tradition since 1955 doesn’t have the accompaniment of the world famous, 28,750-pipe Wanamaker organ. The Organ, it turns out, plays at the 12 PM and 6 PM (save Christmas Eve) performance. 

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From the classic tile Wanamaker mosaic mural entrance at Market st and W. Penn Sq we set forth, to the new Dim Sum Garden! A huge new location two doors down from the original Dim Sum Garden in Chinatown, not only does it seem to seat more, it also has its own optimized food delivery station in the back. 

For all the renovations the menus we received were the same, torn and battered menus from the old location, a charming touch. We sample many dumplings and split a bottle of warm sake and Ma Po Tofu Noodle dish (I recommend the regular rice version). 

The sun sets. It feels like 9 PM. Chinatown felt on the quiet side itself in the early Christmas Eve evening, but as we walk towards the grocery store for ill-fated Roll ingredients I’m struck by how busy East Market St is, especially after these two years of business men hyperventilating about the failing Fashion District and how we have to build a stadium. Seems ironic that the only part of Market St that isn’t teeming with upper middle class pedestrians after 5 PM now is in Old City, where developers have been most active the longest. 

I leak Ma Po Tofu Noodle sauce leftovers onto my winter coat in Moms and try to fix it in the bathroom. 

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Back in Port Richmond the neighborhood is tucked in. Like much of the city in winter, our neighborhood at night is cozy and menacing. Tidy rowhomes and weird sounds. The streets themselves offer pure conveyance, not a monument or park to speak of just cold conveyance. 

With the chili lights lit on the tree, we make dough for the Cinnamon Rolls using a a recipe off a photograph of the ancient recipe card my mom text over in 2021. I chose the 1941 Hitchcock film “Suspicion,” starring Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine, because the run time that matched the remaining time we had to proof the dough. Grant plays a charmer of a con man sugar baby husband to Fontaine’s naive intellectual wife. Crime wins and nothing resolves. The rolls, it turns out, will never rise.

By 11:45, my girlfriend is in bed reading “Rejection,” which seems to be enthralling her in a way she does not enjoy. Downstairs I place the rolls in the oven. Keepings the oven off, I place a bowl of boiling water under the rolls in hopes that the heat and humidity start a proper proofing. 

This Christmas Eve, the only logistical success I had beyond getting to work not that late was matching the run time of a 1941 film to the recipe’s chill time. 

Maybe I put too much in the day. Maybe starting every day with a book and a pot of coffee is the inverse of how to get things done. Maybe less screen time, and more recipe cards from the 1970s. Maybe I should have just called my mom. All in all, a very nice Christmas Eve.