25 | December | 2016 | tugster: a waterblog

Tugster feels so very blessed this year that I’m recognizing the top gift boat in the sixth boro. If NYC ever decided to have a water-borne symbol of gift-giving season, the most appropriate boat for the elf to ride would HAVE to be this one. See all the packages, wrapped sensibly, on the deck? While you try to name that boat, let me digress a little to use the print to push the next image farther down the page.

Digression #1: Here are my Christmas posts from 2015 2014 one about a Rockefeller Center tree that arrived by ferry one that arrived here by barge towed by a tug called Spuyten Duyvil and finally my post from 2013.

Digression #2: If you’re not from NYC or a large city, you might wonder where city folks go to cut their trees. Here’s a feature from the NYTimes about a Christmas tree vendor who’s come to the same neighborhood NYC with trees for the past 19 years.

Digression #3: Nope, I don’t get my tree from this vendor. In fact, I haven’t had a tree for . . . decades. Not interested. So here was the post I put up in 2006, about my first ever Christmas present. Here’s the story about our first Christmas tree. My father, who drove a school bus in addition to running a dairy farm, brought home our first tree back when I was 5 or 6. I think it was his and my mother’s first also, because “christmas trees” did not exist for them in pre-WW2 Netherlands. Where did he get the tree and what prompted him to bring it home, you might wonder . . . Well, as he was leaving the school with his last bus run before the Christmas break, he noticed the custodian throwing a tree into the snowbank next to the dumpster. It must have been set up somewhere in the school–the office? We LOVED that tree, and it still had some tinsel on it. My parents were willing to spring for a string of lights, which could be used again year after year, but tinsel? In my imagination, that tree was the best.

When my kids were small, I did get a Christmas tree, and we decorated it with more than a string of lights.

So have you figured out this vessel that does nothing all year round except deliver packages like these?