Christmas 2012:
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.

Dear Friends,

You have your way of measuring changes wrought during 2012; we have ours.

The Stollen count is significantly off this year, currently at two rather than six or seven. Springerle and Lebkuchen futures are also at all-time lows, and the bottom has fallen out of the eggnog market. (Dan is in Europe.)

Analysts — that would be the two of us — are not worried. The low Stollen, Springerle, and Lebkuchen numbers are very likely a simple market correction and may be a strong positive signal of healthy change: There is a limit to what a two-person household can or should consume. The fundamentals are sound and the consensus view of 2013 is decidedly bullish. Consider:

• A May wedding. News of Susan’s engagement reached us by telephone from the Normandy Coast where she and George had traveled last summer. (Smokes, the noble, very well-trained Lab with the sweet disposition, stayed here on the Lane.)
• A restaurant in Madrid. Dan has opened Tierra, a fine burrito and margarita establishment on the western side of Madrid. Its fresh food and its carefully preserved brick walls have attracted notice, and the trend lines are up. We will be in Madrid ourselves between Christmas and New Years, to have a look around and catch up. (Check it out: www.tierraburritos.com.)
• An architect in the making. Anson has returned to his interest in architecture, taken the plunge into graduate school, and finished his first semester at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He and Reva moved from 49th Street in Manhattan to new quarters in Brooklyn.

Though the Stollen count was silent on the matter, change is also coming to the choral enterprises. Both the Providence Singers and Sine Nomine are searching for new artistic leadership, but we are riding the crest of grand musical discoveries. We both got way into Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem — his music and Wilfred Owen’s poetry — and did the Brahms Requiem with the Rhode Island Philharmonic in the spring. There was the Duruflé Requiem (now Mark’s favorite requiem) earlier this fall, and this year’s Messiah was an everything-is-new-again Baroque-styled performance with Andrey Nemzer, a counter-tenor bound for international acclaim.

Yes, there was a garden this year and it was good (ask us about the homegrown butternut squash soup), but the real news from the Lower 40 was the installation of the terraza (“patio” seems déclassé). It’s built entirely of travertine, a pockmarked, weathered, ancient-looking stone that Wikipedia tells us was used to build the Coliseum and is among the world’s oldest building materials. We stayed close to home during the summer, firing up the travertine fire pit and, when the Olympics were on, firing up the iPads at 6 a.m. to watch niece Elsa compete for Spain in beach volleyball.

We did, however, take a week in the Berkshires, where the Liz Gerring Dance Company and niece Adele were in residence at Jacob’s Pillow, performing She Dreams in Code. It was an intense time of dance, Tanglewood performances, and hikes along chunks of the Appalachian Trail. We recommend it.

One odd, ironic highlight of the year sticks in our mind. After 26 years of marriage and occasional golf, we managed to make simultaneous birdies on the par-three 17th hole of the local course. That’s one drained 35-foot putt (Alli) and one statistical improbability chipped in God-knows-how from God-knows-where (Mark).

We mention this not to brag or because we’re clueless enough to think you might enjoy a good golf yarn, but to insinuate encouragement and our best wishes for the new year into the text here, near the end. Serendipity, as we have shown, can crash down upon you in sweltering July when you are parched, disgusted, and fatigued. Or maybe when the phone rings on your desk and it’s a very excited person calling from Normandy. You don’t even have to hold yourself open to the possibilities.

Duck if you must, but we are hoping that the crash of serendipity and general good news will follow you throughout the new year. Give us a shout; let us know how that’s going.

Love and best wishes,

allison-mcmillan@cox.net
mark-nickel@cox.net