The Magic of Money and Work

I had never been to the famous Christmas (well, "holiday," I suppose) extravaganza they do at Longwood Gardens, which is damn near walking distance from me. Longwood Gardens is a place some member of the du Pont family lived once, and making gunpowder for a disputatious world is lucrative, so it's one of those places where you literally can't believe how well these rich people live. I go there fairly often, but I'd never been to the famously crowded Chr—uh, holiday thing, but this year I went, the way certain New Yorkers finally get around in middle age to see the Statue of Liberty.

Of course it was quite something, but without making a total project out of it I couldn't convey the real charm, which was what it's like to be among all the lights and flowers they arranged for us at night. The famous conservatory, which one usually sees in the day, was dark above (it's a greenhouse, see) and seeing it with the lighting they'd devised—they have a huge staff, all in the service of impressing you, and they usually succeed—seeing this was really very cool.

But it was being outside that really made it magical, and it would take a very serious effort to convey it. The trees all through vast grounds were wound about with intensely colored lights, and you needed a cinematographic poet like Peter Weir to convey what it was like to walk through them. Unless you were fatally hip—which thank goodness, I'm not, I mean, gee whillikers—it was really pretty special.

Right now I'm plunging into a whirl of freezing rain and other fun stuff to go to my writers' group holiday party deal. Wish me luck!