People you hardly know...

...but who love you anyway. That's "family" to me. Apart from my brother, sister, and parents (and now, including them), everyone who I call family has always lived a thousand miles away.

But there's something magical about Christmas with family, even when they are relative strangers. It's exhilirating to watch 8 shrieking kids, 15 or 20 cousins, and a dozen aunts and uncles (and a partridge in a pear tree) open presents, even when you opened yours on the 20th. It's comforting to share several enormous meals -- feasts! -- prepared by mother, brother, niece over the course of days. Over the course of decades, if you count the handing down of recipes and tradition. And it's an honor to take home an old dress of your grandmother's, the one you never met but still miss. And it's really something to share a scotch with your grandfather, who, at 92, still has funny, fierce stories to tell.

There's a palpable rightness with the world. Oh, this is holiday spirit. I hope you all found it this year too.