Here is Summer.

Summer loves the Christmas season, and she truly believes NYC does Christmas better than any place else in the world. After all, where else does Christmas mean so many different things to so many different people? Whatever it takes to make you feel festive—or, irritable and offended—you can pretty much find it in December in NYC.

All the usual extremes of NYC life are even more extreme at Christmas. Christmas in NYC is traditional, and also up-to-the-moment. It’s serious and self-mocking. It’s elegant and tacky. It’s serene and frenetic, spiritual and crassly commercial, generous and selfish. It’s giant trees and miniature trains. It’s spectacularly overcrowded, and warmly intimate.

Summer loves all of it, as long as there are twinkly lights against cold dark skies, the scent of evergreens (she prefers the actual smell to the air-freshener variety), thin candy canes (not those thick ones), and true efforts to be kind.

Summer is fascinated by what makes people happy, so this year she visited Macy’s Santa Land, a place she would ordinarily avoid like the plague. The line was not nearly as long as she had been led to believe, and everyone in the line seemed cheerful: miracle on 34th street! Santa and the helper Elf were efficient and professional, the Elf asked what Summer’s name was and then addressed her by it smilingly. Summer’s only complaint about the experience is about all the penguins in the display. She feels strongly that it’s not right to give children the false impression that penguins live at the North Pole.

Summer is made from scraps of black and white velvet. Her sweater is made from an old sock of my daughter’s that was, clearly, always an ugly Christmas sweater at heart and has now realized its dream. Her fuzzy jacket is made from an athletic sock, and her skirt is made from a sock I was given free on an airplane.

Oh, Christmas isn’t just a day. It’s a frame of mind.