A very Merry day to all, from Mr. Muscato, Koko, Boudi and me, with a little help from Ike and Mamie's 1960 Christmas greeting - a Café tradition, on and off, since 2009. There's just something about those calligraphic bangs that sends me into gales of giggles.

What does it say about me that one of reasons I treasure the holidays - not a major one, granted, but an annual moment to cherish nonetheless - is the opportunity to appreciate again the Eisenhower's 1960 Christmas card?

Many happy returns today to two of the Café's favorite (for very different reasons) ladies...

Well, if Clare Boothe Luce liked it, it has to be good!

It was especially thoughtful of the designer to have included this tome's original title, so that paperback buyers needn't have fretted whether Red Carpet for Mamie Eisenhower (or is it actually the more stentorian Red Carpet for MAMIE EISENHOWER?) was in fact a new and different biography than the seminal Red Carpet for Mamie that they had bought in hardback last year when they were on vacation at Ogunquit and it was the only thing the damn drugstore stocked besides the awful Taylor Caldwell novel that Aunt Gert gave them at Eastertime.

I can't think of a better way to wish all of you every good thing of this season and the Merriest of Christmases than by cribbing the Eisenhowers' 1960 Christmas card. I'm especially entranced with the calligraphic interpretation of the dear lady's trademark bangs.

It's a fine, clear Christmas morning here at the Café. As Mr. Berlin wrote, "The sun is shining, the grass is green;/The orange and palm trees sway." If we're not particularly dreaming of a white Christmas ourselves, it's likely because I think our day will be more than sufficiently merry and bright right here, however tempting it might be to indulge in nostalgia for days gone by.

In a little while, I'll go wake up Mr. Muscato and the dog, and perhaps rather more delicately intimate to the just-arrived Miss Rheba (a trouper after twenty-odd hours in the air) that too much sleep only makes the jetlag worse. We'll have breakfast, open a gift or two, and then, I think, go investigate the beaches and give Koko a chance to bark at the waves, a favorite pastime. Dinner, later, at one of the grand hotels. We are very lucky.

And I suppose we will spend a moment, here and there, remembering. Christmas, freighted down as it is with expectations and associations, tradition and religion, excess and obligations, becomes a kind of milestone, a stopping place from which we can look back and see, like the illuminated tableaux pictured on Victorian glass slides or the lighted tableaux of department-store Christmas windows, bits and pieces of ourselves from earliest childhood on.

Here's the year that there was so much snow that all the cousins and relations spent the night; there's the first year you knew that Santa Claus was really Dad. On they march - the first Christmas away from home, feeling very grown-up and secretly homesick beyond belief; the year that there wasn't much of a Christmas, after two funerals; Christmas in New York, surrounded by friends that formed a new family; and now, these last years, Christmases that feel like home again, wherever we may end up being.

Maybe that's a sign that you really have grown up; when the Christmas that you make for yourself, whatever it may be, feels like home.

You know what I think the most remarkable thing about this picture is? That little Mrs. Hoxenfelder here - doubtless a pillar of her Methodist church and a lady of generally impeccable meekness - is being restrained by two burly policement from joining a throng that is en-mobbing...

Who do you think? Elvis? the Beatles? Conrad Birdie?

Nope. It is, in fact, that white-hot focus of mid-century fanatical fandom:

Mamie Eisenhower.

Eat your heart out, Michelle. But you have to wonder if this kind of thing ever happened to Pat Nixon. Except maybe in Peking...

If I seem a little distracted today, darlings, it's because Mr. Muscato and I are having a few friends in for dinner. Ergo, of course, Mamie, for nothing makes me think of dear Mrs. Eisenhower like preparing to be a gracious host.

Our local supermarket has of late been offloading turkeys, you see, at prices not to be missed. We picked up a couple last week (ah, the joys of an extra deep freeze!), and this week noticed that the management has now supplemented the signs promoting the sale with a prominent "Consume soon!" sticker. Appetizing.

As a result, dinner, which will consist of a 10-kilo turkey with all - or at least most of - the trimmings. While we're doing most of the cooking, for neither the first nor the last time I realize how deeply grateful I am to be living in a country that enables one to have household help. Without Ermilia, we would live in deepest squalor; with her, we have a life that almost approaches the Edwardian in its ease and tidiness.

Because it's a school night, it won't be so much a full-fledged party as a gathering - tightum (and only just that) on the Tilling scale, for the Luciaphiles amongst us. Although we won't be playing bridge. And I doubt many parties at Miss Mapp's came with the possibility that one of the guests might belly-dance. Although I suppose with Quaint Irene around, one never knew...

Of course, I'm all about our new first lady, and totally into her contemporary, fashion-forward vibe. That doesn't mean, though, that I've lost any affection for the former White House mistress who was perhaps the Divine Michelle's polar opposite:

Isn't she glorious? Mamie, Mamie, Mamie, serene in her be-capelet-ed coat and double row of pearls.

She may not have been a Vogue covergirl, but on her watch, entertaining at the White House did have a kind of splendour:

It's hard to believe this is only fifty-odd years ago. It might as well be a study for a Winterhalter group portrait.

While this lightly fraught moment carries with it more than a whiff of Velazquez, no?

The Red Room looked pretty good, but the Blue Room shows why Jackie had her work cut out for her. I like this blurry shot, though, which reminds me of Deborah Turbeville's Versailles photos.

You may not be startled to know that I have a weirdly associative mind. It's a fine line between that and aphasia, I know, but so far I've managed to keep it in check. Nonetheless, the sight of a battered, dirty, pink-flowered hat seen in the window of a Cairo junk shop this morning immediately called up one phrase: it was, underneath the dust and ravages of time, Mamie Pink, that strident yet creamy shade that so dominated 50s fashion and design. And thus, inevitably, Mamie Eisenhower.

She had the most vulgar first name for a first lady since the surprisingly butch "Lou" Hoover (and not really fair to say, since there were only Eleanor and Bess, such prissy names, in between). There's something distinctly downmarket about "Mamie," as opposed to the more flamboyant Mame; the former calls to mind Mamie Van Doren, and the latter, of course, Mame Dennis.

It's no accident that Claude and Doris Upson, the odious stand-ins for all things babbitty and dreadful, insist on calling Mame Dennis "Mamie" - it sets them apart, immediately, as the middle-class drones they are.

Still, she had a little more style than legend has it:

Even if her trademark bangs weren't uniformly successful:

She had a kind of grandmotherly appeal that you don't see often anymore (and when you do, it's usually cloaking a horrendous, all-devouring Mommie type like Barbara Bush):

She was a supremely practical lady, concerned with the contents of her larder:

(I think one source of my fascination is that this is exactly but exactly how my maternal grandmother used to dress.)

And she kept rather good company:

Is it possible that the two gentleman who have chosen to accompany the ladies over to the Smithsonian are J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson? What a party that must have made...

I suppose it should have been a hint to my poor beleaguered parents that when we went to Washington when I nine, the only thing I wanted to see in the whole city was the Smithsonian's exhibition of First Ladies Gowns. Mamie's is there, of course; and of course, it's pink - Mamie Pink.