We awoke this morning to find the world covered in a blanket of snow. Through the weird weather patterns that often afflict the Chicago area, we got over 2 inches last night, while two towns away there is nothing at all.

This is the first time in years I haven�t had any Christmas Eve gigs. I�m kind of sad about not singing this year (although this was totally my choice), but it will be nice not to be sprinting hither and yon in the snow wondering how my family is doing without me.

Christmas Eve is always completely insane in the Harriet household. Inevitably the gifts have not yet been wrapped (or at least not all of them). The cookies have not all been baked, and there�s always the fruitcake.

Every year, the day after Thanksgiving I make a fruitcake. Some may laugh, but I love a good fruitcake and when I couldn�t find one a few years back, I took matters into my own hands. Thanksgiving night I throw all the fruit into a big bowl and pour brandy on it to soak overnight. The next day I bake it. Then for the next month I pour brandy over the top every day until Christmas Eve when it gets encased in marzipan and frosted (to seal in the moisture, mostly, although I confess to having a marzipan fetish) and served at the annual Christmas party.

The stuff is lethal. After soaking up all the brandy, the thing weighs seven or eight pounds. A couple of slices will make you feel rather�merry. Needless to say, I am very popular at the family Christmas party. There�s something I like about watching my aunts�in-law get schnockered on my fruit cake. It�s a beautiful sight to see.

My husband�s family all lives on the northwest side of Chicago and nearby suburbs, with only a couple of exceptions. The family gets together en masse twice a year on Independence Day and Christmas Eve. But Christmas Eve is the big one. There are usually at least 60 people there. My mother-in-law, two of her sisters (the third, her twin, lives on the West Coast), all of their children, and all of their children. AJ is the youngest by a couple of years. The oldest is pushing 80.

The Christmas party is the venue for all major family announcements (engagements, weddings, babies). Presents are surreptitiously brought in for the children, while behind the scenes there is always an argument about who is going to play Santa. The Santa suit is old and is passed around from year to year, but no one seems to mind. The family is amazingly easy to join. There isn�t a dud among them � all kind, fun and generous people. Rarely do you hear anyone talking about another behind someone�s back. And they all seem to genuinely enjoy seeing one another � there is no sense of enforced blood relations.The children are well behaved, interesting and articulate. In good Polish-Italian Catholic form, the party starts after the late afternoon, usually around 6 or 6:30 Mass and continues on until midnight Mass, by which point the men of the oldest generation are usually snoring in odd corners, the children are capering, hopped up on sugar and the anticipation of presents to come, and the women are all trying to help in the kitchen at once.

My own family is small and we were always isolated from most of our relatives by geography and occasionally by bad feelings, so these large gatherings were completely unfamiliar to me. But they always make it feel like a real celebration.

Whatever your form of celebration (or, for that matter, non-celebration) may be, I hope you all have the best kind of day.

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