“Merry Christmas!” Anne cries, giving me a hug as they enter the house and begin peeling off coats. “You look great. I don’t remember those pants. Are they new?”

I accept a kiss from Philip and point their kids upstairs, where my two are playing in the bonus room. “Yeah. I was tired of you always giving me such a hard time for wearing baggy clothes.”

Philip’s already heading to the kitchen with the bottle of wine they brought, while Anne and I hang up coats in the hall closet.

“It’s about time you bought yourself something sexy,” Anne continues as I shut the closet door. “You’ve a great figure, Jack. Show it off.” Anne’s been on a diet for the last year. She loses weight, and then three months later it comes back.

“You’ll lose the weight, Anne. You always do.”

“Just to gain it back.”

“Well, you can always try my weight-loss program,” I say lightly, sliding a hanger into the last coat. “Get divorced, break your heart, cry yourself sick for a month or two, and the weight will just melt off.”

“You did get skinny.”

“Annie, you’re happily married. You’ve three gorgeous kids. Five or ten extra pounds shouldn’t change your self-worth.”

“Shouldn’t, no. But they do.”

And isn’t this the truth? We do see our value in terms of our weight, our hair, our physical desirability. Shouldn’t be so, but is.

The doorbell rings again. Nic and Kristine and their families have arrived all at once, and suddenly the house is bursting at the seams as kids pound up and down the stairs and the men gather round the bar I’ve set up in the dining room.

“Everything looks fabulous,” Kristine compliments, smoothing her tailored black trousers. Once a lawyer, always a lawyer, and even at Christmas Kris has a practical, no-nonsense approach to wardrobe.

“Thanks.”

“Is that the infamous tree?” Nic asks, nodding at my problem Christmas tree in the corner of the living room.

“It is.” I accept the poinsettia Nic has brought, place it on the antique console in the hall. “Wine? Champagne? What sounds good?”

Champagne seems to be the drink of choice tonight, and we head for the kitchen, where the kids have already devoured half the crackers and nearly all the grapes from the cheese tray.

Anne, seeing my lavish appetizer buffet on the granite counter—cheese platter, pâté, chilled dill shrimp, hot crab dip, smoked-salmon spread—turns and looks at me with an arched eyebrow. “What?” she asks, deadpan. “No Cocoa Puffs?”

This is a little inside joke. A few years back, Anne and I got into a tense standoff—about nutrition, no less. Anne’s a great cook, very healthy, into organic foods, and she once said that maybe if I didn’t feed my kids so much sugar, Jessica might be calmer and William not so husky. I took offense.