Christmas 2010:
The annual report from Gideon Lawton Lane

Annual Christmas letters get a mixed reception: tossed unread, browsed lightly, responded to. In the aggregate, though, they have some historical value, some bits of information about who’s doing what. So here’s the archive.

27 December 2010
The Seventh Stollen

Dear Friends,

Greetings from a Gideon Lawton Lane that is just beginning to dig out from the Boxing Day Blizzard of 2010. It was neck-and-neck coming up I-95, but we managed to pull into Portsmouth from Christmas in Washington almost exactly as the blizzard was hitting its stride. Gusts of 50 mph and better. Deck chairs, market umbrellas with their cast iron stands, flowerpots, tables — they’re all out there somewhere in the snow. More careful homeowners would have stored all the deck furnishings in the garage or basement around Halloween. But where’s the adventure in that?

All of our grocery stores were closed because of the storm, so we hunkered down with what was on hand: two kinds of herring, a bit of organic pancake mix, apples, walnuts, Springerle, coffee, and a few eggs. Yes, it’s an oddly equipped empty nest, but we make do. There was still some maple firewood in the garage, felled by Brother Jim at his A-frame in the Catskills and lumberjacked into “Klotzes” by an ax-wielding Anson during our Thanksgiving visit. (We also discovered apple-walnut pancakes on that Thanksgiving trip, so that’s what we made for dinner last night.)

We took our Stollen on the road this year, heading south through New York City, where we picked up Anson, and on to Washington, where we found Susan, her new black lab puppy named Smokes, and an extended McMillan family that includes five of our favorite little people.

Anson recently started a job at New York Legal Assistance Group and seems to be greatly enjoying life in The City. Susan is finishing graduate work in nonprofit arts management at American University and has added a program that will lead to teacher certification in studio art. Dan joined us by iPhone from Minnesota, where he had just finished the last exam of his last semester of law school and was waiting for Delta to reschedule him to the East Coast. None of our airports were handling incoming flights at the time.

The 2011 Burpee’s gardening catalog was in the mailbox on our return to Portsmouth, so we’ve started to plan the garden even before the New Year. The Year of the Cardoon went well, but we discovered we really don’t like cardoons.

Mark continues to serve on a committee that is trying to establish a community center for the arts in Portsmouth. The committee’s public opinion survey of Portsmouth households found strong support for the idea but even stronger opposition to using any public money. So the committee is trying to do a public project without public funds. It may yet happen.

Alli is busier than ever with the Providence Singers, which is currently searching for its fifth artistic director in 40 seasons. Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis and a near-definitive reading of Handel’s Messiah are already in this season’s rearview mirror. Still to come, the music of Nancy Galbraith (including a world première), a performance of Carmina Burana, Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 (for the women, anyway) with the Philharmonic, and a season-ending benefit recital in June.

Right now, though, we’re starting a week that’s almost entirely off the grid. Brown University is shuttered. The Singers and Sine Nomine (another of Mark’s groups) are in hiatus until January. We are warming to the idea of breathing deeply, sleeping late, burning maple, reading on the iPad, and reflecting a bit on a world that seems to be running faster and more noisily by the week. We hope you can manage a little kickback time as well before we all plunge back in.

With love and warm wishes for a terrific New Year,

Mark and Alli