I'd made plans to meet a friend of mine for dinner tonight, so I took the bus and got of near the City Hall building, so I could walk to his hotel. I was walking thinking about one of the many blogging articles I re-read today, when suddenly I noticed trees with Christmas lights in them. This is hardly an unusual sight seeing as it's December and all, but these trees were standing around a skating rink I didn't notice at first. Someone had set this thing up with a white fence around it and a little house next to it. And they had put up Christmas lights in all the trees, so kids could go ice skating with their parents right there in the middle of the city.

Now, I know I sometimes come of as a bitter. Some might even say sardonic or just downright cynical, but there was something about parents watching their children ice skate that was really nice. Because lights are nice, and families are nice, and somehow it just seemed like one of those perfect moments that you sometimes see on a postcard or in a movie. But this was extra nice, because it was real.
My initial response was a vague memory of a movie scene, where people are ice skating in front of Rockefeller Center. That was my frame of reference for some reason. That then reminded me of the book Corpsing, where the main character keeps questioning his gut reactions, because he feels they're clichéed, because he's seen people react that way in movies (like falling to your knees in a cemetary). I can relate to that, because more often than not my response while discussing something is a reference from TV instead of from real life (Oh yeah, that's just like the episode where Joey and Chandler get free porn!). And when I see something like skating kids I'll reference it to a movie before even thinking about other ice skating kids I've seen or perhaps an anecdote someone has told me about ice skating.

But even though the image of ice skating children smiling at their parents might be as big a cliché as a picture of children building a snowman or perhaps drinking hot cocoa in front of a fireplace doesn't mean that those things aren't nice. And for some reason it made me smile even though it was freezing outside, so I've decided to put the Christmas cynicism on hold for as long as possible. I'm not complete sold on the holiday just yet, but for now I'll try to enjoy as much of it as I can.