Being a Jew at this season has great advantages. I love the lights, the music, the energy. I like the decorations and the sidewalk markets and I love getting and sending cards, though the ones I send mostly have to do with Peace on Earth, which I figure needs all the help it can get. I can love all this stuff because it comes without baggage: no worries about a long present list or pressure to top whatever clever gifts I gave last year, no mounting anxiety about an approaching claustrophobic time with family members and in-laws. It's just a lovely foreign holiday to me. So I went to see the Rockefeller Center tree, which is quite splendid and simple and HUGE, studded with primary-color lights, no ornaments. I watched the ice skaters twirling under it (I've never had the nerve to skate in that fishbowl). I strolled up 6th Ave., where one of the buildings trots out my favorite decorations every year: a string of multicolored lights like the ones you put on a tree, except each bulb is eight feet tall. The next building has the round glass ornaments you'd put on the same tree, a pile of them, also each eight feet tall, this year all red. And now I sit in the lobby lounge of the Hilton, drinking tea and blogging. Greetings of the season.