Two years ago I spent Christmas in Amsterdam with people I know. There was a city of people waiting to be known. Before I left, people kept saying that I would love Amsterdam, so I was determined not to love Amsterdam. What could be so charming about some big European city? I would have jet lag in the winter, and it would be dark and cold and gloomy, and I did not want to go to the red light district.

After a long, tiring, and, yet wonderful flight, in the very early मोर्निंग just before sunrise, before real sunlight, the lavender glow of morning twilight began moving into the sky. I looked down beneath the wing of the plane and saw a million lights glowing in harmonious unity, embedded in the purple luminescence. "It looks like Limoges", I remarked to the man next to me. "More likely Brussels", he said.

I was waved right through customs, but it took a long time to get my baggage and leave the glassed-in greenhouse-like room where we and the carousel of luggage, the newly imported, were enclosed. There were people outside, looking in eagerly. I sensed how primates feel in their habitats, being enjoyed for their amusing antics. They, on the outside, looked happy, like viewing the first shipment of beautiful flowers out of season or rare treats and sweets being unloaded from a caravan. I am possibly overstating the case for our desirability.

Finally, I exited with my luggage and entered Planet Amsterdam. It was morning, dark as evening, but crisp and clear. First and foremost, I wanted to meet my new bed, the very counterpart of my old bed, my nest of dreams-and-snuggle-down. I cared not who may have just vacated it, so travel-weary was I.

Barely had I slept off the worst of the jet lag, before I was coaxed into some type of consciousness, and off we went into the streets to rent videos. It was just like home in a crazy kind of way, since people were speaking an incomprehensible array of languages. We selected a movie and returned to a cozy home and a warm supper. Looking out the windows, I saw people carrying Christmas pies and cakes on bicycles, bags full of unknown and, presumably, scrumptious things.

The next morning there was that filtered sunlight famous in Dutch paintings. I went for my first outing alone. It was like walking in your very own good dream. There was a windmill on my walk. I crossed a little bridge. Water was everywhere, and it was wonderful. I talked to a blond man who kept spilling things from his bicycle pack onto the ground and picking them up again. It was like pantomime.

I was wined and dined and taken to attractions. We sight-saw and rode trains. Language was all around us. We had breakfast in steaming, teaming coffee kitchens. My hosts served me Brussel sprouts with my meal, the best I had ever had. Warm dinners and heartfelt everything were in great supply.

When I returned to the USA, someone asked me how I liked Amsterdam. I told them I didn't like it. I loved it.

And that is what I wish for everyone in My Imaginary Life: Have a Happy and Joyous New Year's Sense of Belonging in the fullest sense of the word and the world and the community.

Christmas happened, and it happened on Christmas Day. I made spinach dip with water chestnuts, using guacamole dip instead of sour cream. I used wide fried Chinese egg noodles for chips instead of tortilla chips which are scientifically engineered to cut up your mouth. I made a new chicken fajitas recipe that I found on the Internet, substituting Morningstar chicken fake meat stuff and wrapped them in spinach green fajita wrappers. I have aspirations of being a vegetarian now and then, even though I particularly like chicken. I also made giant blueberry muffins with struesel topping. I gave myself a treat and had a Pepsi with real sugar instead of a Diet Coke. Now I read that it's better to kill yourself with "white poison" (sugar) than to die of cancer from artificial sweeteners. Some have gone so far as to say that is why they put artificial sweeteners in food.

Of course, after I made all the food, I got scared to be alone with it, for fear I might eat it, all of it by myself, so I packaged a lot of it up and trucked it over to Tootsie Roll's house to share with her and her friend Tough Customer. (Please remember that I use these thinly disguised aliases for my own protection.) They swapped some hot home-made tamales for some of the fajitas. You would think we lived south of the U.S. border.

In the end, I was no better off. I had as much food as I had begun with, only with more variety.

On Christmas Day I sent e-cards to a lot of people. I sent a Holland Card to Lover-Boy because I had just heard from him via e-mail after some time had elapsed. I don't know that it was him who sent the e-mail, because I suspect his secretary sometimes sits down at his computer and e-mails me in his name. I always think it is she when I ask a hard question and it doesn't get answered right away. I think: He will answer it when he gets back to the office.

I picked out a nice photo of footprints in virgin snow. One set. Then I thought: I hope he doesn't think that I mean to tell him it's Jesus carrying him through the snow. Maybe he will think he is tracking the Yeti. Or maybe he will think I am saying he is the Yeti. Or maybe he will think I am tracking him. I sent it anyway, acknowledging to myself that any card with a message can be interpreted in various ways.

Prehistoric Boyfriend called on Christmas Day and talked for a couple of hours. He hunts saber-tooths or is it saber-teeth? He likes women to have long hair and wear gunny sacks and be sweet and giggle and be willing to swap sex for simple household tasks. He is barking up the wrong tree. I fear for him. He thinks I am a sin-filled tart who won't share. I guess that makes me stingy.

Last time he was in town, we sat down at my table and had tea, while I grilled him in a manner that would make MI6 blush. It was his own fault. When I told him I was a monster, he did not believe me.

Christmas Monday I went Christmas ornament shopping, which is my favorite. Everything is 50 percent off. I put them in a storage box, and next Christmas they are just like new. I love all that stuff. It's kitsch to the max. Tootsie Roll berates me for my bad habit of buying stuff I don't need, but I 'm shameless about Christmas decorations. It's fun. I bought ten rolls of beautiful ribbon and a little angel. One day, I will give it all away.

On my way to the car to go Christmas ornament shopping, I noticed that my neighbor Ken Doll had thrown his tree out already. There it was, "butt-necked", just flung on the ground waiting to be re-cycled, not even one strand of tinsel on its limbs. I suspect he is fickle in his personal affairs too, although I am only guessing.

I wanted to buy a real tree with roots in a container and then plant it in the yard after Christmas, but after I thought it through I realized it wouldn't take too many Xmases before the yard would look like a Christmas tree lot, and I would run out of people who would let me plant a tree in their yard, and pretty soon I might be the unwelcome guest who was always trying to foist a free evergreen on someone. I zilched that idea.

After the shopping frenzy was over, I went for a walk to clear my conscience of Spinach Dip Guilt. I felt a lot better. There were quite a lot of people out walking with the same problem.

It was a nice break from work, but I had dreamed of walking through blinding snow with tennis rackets on my feet in place of snowshoes that I do not have or lying naked on white sand in some sub-tropical location while being basted in coconut oil, and, oh, what-the-hell, turned on a spit, if need be. My Imaginary Life.

I think that life was made for celebration. I have decorated my cube at work. It is quite small, so a little decoration goes a long way. I have been baking almost every day and bringing muffins to work, and candy, and mixed nuts. Someone has been giving me little gifts. I find them appearing mysteriously in different spots in my cube when I enter it from time to time. I am supposed to think there are pixies at work.

I called Little Bird for a Christmas talk. My four-year-old nephew Ear Implant commandeered the phone trying to break through to me while Little Bird was wending her way to the telephone. His time was short so he had to talk fast. So fast, in fact, that I couldn't really make out what he was trying to say. It did sound a lot like secret code for "When are you going to bust me out of this nut house, Aunt? But I can't be sure.

Little Bird sounded the same and no wonder. She lives in a third world war zone in the picturesque county side pastureland of the gold and green prairie land in the middle of nowhere.

The old neighbors, you know, the people from California who are reputed to have operated a bordello (or maybe they just said they were bored, hello) out there and had that cabin on the main road and who also tried to re-survey everyone's land, move the ancient boundary lines, and close down the road so they would be landlocked, well, they're all gone now. The cabin burned down down down to the ground. Someone bought up all the land where the cabin was sitting and re-sold it to some guy who is going to have a parrot farm (or was that a ferret farm?).

That was the first story I heard about The Land Man. It turns out the essence of that story might be true, but some other people are now thinking of having a land grab too and burning out everyone else because, if you remember the place near the crossroads and how they sold it to the new people, then you know the new people just disappeared leaving a For Sale sign in the window which mysteriously ended up lying in the front lawn and was still lying there long after they had vacated, along with an angry bashed in white fence railing, maybe bashed by an angry pickup driver.

A few nights ago, Little Bird saw an eerie orange glow in the sky and went up to the main road just in time to see the last of the fire that ate up that place completely (which was formerly at the crossroads) just across the street from where the cabin once was and someone, word to your mother, told little Bird that she had better watch out because fires seemed to be going around. She says she's afraid to go to sleep at night for fear the house will spontaneously combust while she's off guard.

Fires must be catching because another place near the old railroad tracks burned down after that.The thing is, it's all true.

I told Little Bird that I remembered why I called. It was because it was so much fun out there.

I dream of putting in an orchard. It might last days before it was attacked by chainsaws or run over completely by a tractor or raptor or just disappear into thin air, as in, Did anybody notice what happened to my one hundred apple trees? They were there last week.

There has only been a bit of snow this year. Snow in the mouth of Sleipir, the imaginary horse.

I have called some friends scattered about the world and asked them about their snow. Oh yes, they say, ""It really snowed here". "How much?" I would ask. They answer "In boatloads, with the strength of steam engines, needing to be moved by bulldozers, rakes, shovels, snow blowers and teams of men working through the night until the next day without stopping for lunch, rearranging the snow by putting it in other places."

Ten years ago, in another place, another time, something about the snow called me to the window. It beckoned, a white maiden blizzard, a mermaid to the sailor rocks. I ran to the sea of it, although first I put on my hat and scarf and boots and mittens. Romance is great, but what's a love affair if it gives you pneumonia?

There I stood beneath the haloed lamplight, becoming cross-eyed as I tried to follow the paths of single snowflakes as they plummeted wetly onto my eyelashes. I called out to the city with my busy-broadcasting-day-radio-station voice "Everybody, put on your galoshes and come outside with me."

Looking up, I was reminded of the computer screen savers that make you feel as if you were traveling through star galaxies at a pretty good clip.

The thing about a blizzard is that you are always alone in it. Once, walking from the street to my house, a distance of only a few hundred yards, I got lost. It was daytime, but I was snow-blind. I walked a fence line. I fell down. I laughed. I ate some snow. It was snow madness.

My mother told me that her stepfather, from North Dakota,had told her that he used to tie a rope from the house to the barn so he could get to the barn in a blizzard without getting lost.

I invented a foolproof method for drunks to get home using my grandfather's technique. Substituting the house for the bar and home for the barn, I thought that if you didn't live too far from the bar, you could just run a cable from your house to your bar stool, hook a strap to your suspenders or your bibbers or your belt loop. Even if you were as drunk as a skunk, you could never go too far astray.

If you didn't make it all the way home, someone could just check your cable. Maybe leave you there if it weren't too cold. You could find your own way home when you were feeling better.

"That frozen concoction that helps me hang on."

Maj Lindstrom. Flicka Ricka Dicka. Snip Snap Snur.The Tompten. Twins that make up their own language that only they can understand. The red splash in the white snow in Kill Bill.

We sang a song named Snow in a choral singing group that I religiously attended on Monday evenings. The song was like snow, and we were the wind as we ran through it and celebrated it and ran from it into our warm and sometimes overheated houses.

People in America worship snowmen. They worship pumpkins too, but this is not about Pumpkin. It is about snow and the men made from it.

There is evidence of snowman worship everywhere, but especially at this time of the year, when there is snowfall. Snowmen gods and goddesses can be found in all the shops. Altars of snow people are erected in front yards, in backyards, on roofs and in alleyways.

You can tell a lot about people by what they do with snow.

I was born first. My sister was born second. I weighed a whopping seven pounds and something. She weighed six pounds and something. Together, we were really something, at least according to our grandparents.

We were born eleven months apart.

I had brown hair. Little Bird had white-blond hair that must seemed to be demonized by static electricity. Her hair was much more like feathers to me.

It turned out that she had a matching brain. Her mouth was often open for a lot for different reasons. She was adorable.

Though 11 months apart in age, we were treated like twins. Whatever I got, Little Bird got one just like it in a coordinated color.

My mother regularly bought us new coloring books and crayons. Little Bird would open her book to page one, reach for her box of Crayolas, and begin to color inside the lines, choosing appropriate and tasteful color combinations. Little Bird was famous in our family for her ability to color inside the lines.

I felt pangs of some awful emotion when I looked at her coloring books. It made my chest hurt somewhere near my heart. She filled her coloring books completely and stacked them up carefully. Mine were a ragged raging mess of attempts to stay within the boundaries, with torn covers and the odd pages sticking their tongues out at you.

If you are guessing that she later became an art student, you are correct.

We grew up and older. She entered a serious personal crisis stage at some point. I don't know what brought it on, but one day she announced that she was not my real sister, that she was adopted. I was shocked. This was big news to me and everyone else in the family.

I felt that she was rejecting me in a really deep and personal way. I gave her pep talks about how, even if she were adopted, I had always thought of her as my real sister and didn't intend to change that viewpoint. She continued to stare at me with an icy glare.

Was I left out out of some family genealogy conference somewhere along the way? Why didn't I get that memo? Attention Family Members: Little Bird was found in a nest when we were taking a walk. We robbed it and told everyone that Little Bird was ours.

The last straw: she turned to me yet again and said, "I don't want to be your goon any more." I don't know what brought that on either, but it was clear that I was only imagining that she was my true blue sister and friend.

I had never heard her use that word before. Goon.

I had never thought of her as a goon, much less my own personal goon, but as she put it out there for me to understand, that she was quitting her job as my goon, it hit me that having a goon is a desirous thing and that not having one any longer would be a great setback for me in my march for world domination.

Things have never been the same since. I have had to manage my empire without goons, in fact, without any goon or goons at all.

I would like to have some useful horses, though.

As a child, I had two imaginary friends. Their names were Pokey and Puddy. They were both boys, although I was a girl child. I still am, more or less. I had a very large head and a skinny little body, but I outgrew them in time.

I phased both my imaginary friends out of my life about the time I was to start first grade.

I remember that those imaginary friends drew too much attention from my relatives who would ask me about them constantly, wanting me to tell them about their adventures. My family seemed to have a stronger belief in the imaginary duo than I did.

This became embarrassing for me.

So, I arranged to have one run over by an imaginary school bus, which, if you think about it, is an appropriate end, neither being real and no harm done. The other one, like an old soldier, just faded away. By the time I started the first grade, I had made a clean break with them.

Now grown up, I realize that those imaginary friends were as real as it gets.

As real as it gets is a phrase much like as good as it gets, a phrase that drives me nearly to despairing distraction. Oh heavenly god, this is all the good I am ever going to get? Really, this is as good as it gets? Then let's keep dancing...

I suspect the people who use that expression are trying to convey that very sense of anxiety which it causes me to feel. That is why I don't like it. Knock it off, already. If things are so bad, which is as good as it gets, fix it. Why cry in your beer? Why should cry in mine?

I found two faded black and white photographs of myself as a tyke. It appears that we, my parents and I, were once paupers in Siberia or some other really cold place and lived in an abandoned semi-tractor trailer. Anyway, there I was in a coat and bandana, standing gleefully beside a snowman, a pretty straightforward kind of snowman with stick arms, carrot nose, and pieces of coal for eyes. There is the possibility that the photo was actually of my mother.

Let's just say it was me in that photograph. In the first one, I am wearing gloves. In the other, the snowman is wearing the gloves, and I am not. I have no idea who took those pictures. I don't know who built that snowman. I don't even remember if I put my gloves on the twiggy arms, or if chancing upon someone else's unsuspecting snowman, some evil influence made me rob it of its hand warmers. It could have been my mother.

I don't know the correct sequence of the story told in those photographs. I put the photo without gloves on the snowman's fists in the album first, captioning it "Looking back, that snowman was the best friend I ever had." I wrote a caption for the second photo, showing the snowman wearing the hand warmers, "Hey, give me back my gloves."