Holiday Cheer
By Margit Bisztray, Food Critic

This time of year, it's easy to look around and think that you're not doing enough for the holiday cheer, or that everyone else has more traditions they follow than you do and therefore more holiday spirit. It might be the million-and-one lights on a neighbor's house, or other moms who bake gingerbread houses, or people who send not only Christmas cards but a handwritten letter. Something will make you feel inadequate.

I propose not looking at any other traditions but your own. Maybe write them down and send that as your Christmas letter. Maybe start some of them a little early so you get to enjoy them longer. Maybe invite someone over who doesn't have a family. There is no one way, and no superior way, to celebrate the holidays, and all the ways that different families do it is what makes this time of year festive.

This year, my husband, two kids and I are hosting my father and my sister at our home in Key West. Even though it's early in December, a few of our family traditions have already started, like the European advent calendars and candles to count down the days until Christmas Eve, and the mandatory Nutcracker show. This year, we saw the Key West version, complete with island house and palm tree stage set, chickens instead of mice, egrets instead of the swans, fighting fish instead of the Chinese acrobats.

Here in Key West, we get our tree at the local nursery run by the mentally handicapped. My main task is baking tons and tons of cookies to send to friends, deliver locally, and gift to all the people who help us with yard, pool, babysitting and music lessons, because this is the one thing that makes Christmas feel to me like Christmas. I have to bake tons and tons of cookies.

My Hungarian father will bring his poppyseed pastry roll and his chestnuts to roast, and will politely insist on duck breast for Christmas Eve. He will also bring four cassette tapes (yes, cassette tapes, remember those?) recorded in the 1970s and sounding even older, because he recorded them off of the radio. The scratchy, plaintive European children's choirs and music from the Nutcracker are a part of Christmas we love to endure. Even my Floridian husband can now sing along.

My mother, meanwhile, sends a Norwegian care package, with spices for mulled wine, and marzipan pigs only available this time of year, and ginger crisps, and smoked Arctic char and red and white paper heart baskets to hang on the tree. My children are, in short, experiencing most of the same holiday moments, smells and artifacts I did when I was growing up, when all I could wonder was why didn't WE have a giant Frosty the Snowman lantern glowing in our front yard, and why didn't WE get those giant Tootsie Roll-filled candy canes in our stocking? I wondered, in other words, why our house looked so different, our traditions so weird. The difference now is, there's no snow outside, we wake up Christmas morning to the palm trees and flowers, and our children know that Santa Claus does not come down the chimney in the tropics.

The best way to appreciate your own family traditions is to re-gift them, so go on and give what you've got to those around you.

NOTE: Margit Bisztray has been reviewing restaurants and writing about food for ten years. She has published three editions of The Complete Key West Dining Guide, and her work has appeared in such publications as Vogue, Gourmet, Islands and Metropolitan Home. To read more restaurant reviews, log your own personal opinions, rate your favorite restaurants and watch streaming video archives of these shows and other reviews, visit Margit's Top 5.

me and my family is wanting to move to panama city next year we been coming to PCB for the past 5 years atleast three times a year my wife is a registered nurse i am wanting to open up a game center u have any advice where the best area to move to in PCB or have any advice for me idrealy adpreactioat it
THANK YOU
GENE VECCHIO