How Ayelet Waldman Stole Christmas
Ayelet "Michael Chabon's wife" Waldman, the most happily married woman in America ("our sex life - always vital, even torrid - is more exciting and imaginative now than it was when we first met") is at it again, this time oversharing in the pages of Harper's Bazaar. Unusually, she's venturing out of the marital bed and into the rest of her bliss-filled household, talking about how she and her brood celebrate the holidays. Once upon a time, she says, she coveted her gentile friends' pine-scented rituals, but that all ended when she met Her Husband. "Inclusion in any culture other than the one we were making together no longer mattered to me."
But the alien culture of the rest of the world still threatens to encroach on Waldman-Chabonism sometimes. How does Ayelet cope when it does?
I told [my daughter] Sophie, as I have since told her younger siblings, that there is no such thing as Santa Claus, that he is a character in a story just like Willy Wonka or Amelia Bedelia. I further instruct them that their Christian friends are sweet but gullible, and out of respect for their limitations, we should all work hard to sustain their delusions for as long as possible.
Can there possibly be a more functional, harmonious family on the planet? You'd be so sweetly gullible to think so.