This article is part of David Leonhardt’s newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it each weekday.
This newsletter has two Christmas traditions. The first is to recommend some classic American holiday music — to listen to while you open presents, spend time with family and friends or follow your own ritual.
I usually suggest Duke Ellington’s arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker Suite,” my favorite piece of holiday music, and you can’t go wrong with it. This year, I’ll add another option as well: a version of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” by the Eric Felten Quartet. (You can listen here or download here.)
This isn’t the most familiar version of the song. It’s the one by the songwriter Buck Ram, rather than the one by Walter Kent and Kim Gannon (which Bing Crosby made famous). Felten — a bandleader and writer based in Washington — explained to me that Ram had a legal dispute with Kent and Gannon in the 1940s about whose came first. Kent and Gannon ultimately gave Ram a share of the royalties from the hit version, and Felten believes that the two others clearly wronged Ram.
The second tradition is to encourage you to eat some authentic Chinese food, especially if you don’t celebrate Christmas. That’s an American tradition as well, partly because Chinese restaurants were some of the only restaurants that were once open on Christmas, as the food writer Arthur Schwartz noted.
Major metropolitan areas (and some minor ones too) are now full of excellent Chinese food. The Times’s Pete Wells has recently written about Hunan Slurp and Hutong in New York. Here are guides to Washington, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
On the latest episode of “The Argument” podcast, I mentioned my appreciation of Sichuan peppercorn oil. (And thank you to Time magazine for naming “The Argument” one of its podcasts of the year.) If you go out for Chinese food, try to order at least one dish with ma la — the numbing, tingling spice from Sichuan peppercorns. It’s unlike any other flavor.
Whatever you do today, I hope you enjoy the day. I will be taking a break from writing the newsletter until Thursday, Jan. 2, but you will continue to receive it each day, with links to all Times Opinion pieces published.
Until then: Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and Happy New Year. I am grateful to all of you who spend time with this newsletter.
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