Yesterday A. and I rode the train over into Manhattan, to do some Christmas shopping. First we went to a bookstore on the Upper East Side, but it was closed. So we walked a few blocks to Bloomingdale’s and went inside and passed through the area of retail where perfumes are sold, and rode the escalators up several floors until we arrived at a kitchenware department. At which point we looked for an item that I wanted to include in a gift I was preparing for one of my younger sisters, who is the person I’d been assigned as a so-called ‘secret Santa’, which is how we do Christmas now in my family. So that each of the siblings and their in-laws need to figure out a gift for only one person, rather than for many.