Philadelphia Weekly

Even though it's been through the corporate mill more times than any grand old commercial institution should, Lord & Taylor (n�e Wanamaker's and a few other things) retains an old-time city grandeur that no amount of deed-shifting can shake.

It is mega in the way automats must have been--how pissed am I that I missed the era of food behind little windows in exchange for coins?--and it's as large and imposing and labyrinthine as an old bank, but somehow softer, more filled with possibilities both sparkling and, in the boy's sweater department, itchy.

But that's not the first thing that comes to mind when we walk through the doors on Sunday for the 3 p.m. Christmas light show. That thought is actually something more primal: This place smells like my mom.

It doesn't really, of course. It just smells like what my mom--anybody's mom, really--would smell like if they were a department store, worn with years and old ladies in orthopedic shoes who will still only make an imprint of your credit card with that antique carbon paper device that is sure, five times out of ten, to bust a hairline crack in the card right above your first name.

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My girlfriend and I are here just for the light show today. And the tea sandwiches. And the tabletop foosball in the men's Sharper Image department. And I also could use a new winter cap. But that is it!

The feeling of this, even now, as I'm officially scraping 30, is a positively nuclear one, a seismic blast of redemption. But as soon as it comes, another feeling takes over amid row upon row of plaid Tommy Hilfiger shirts and DKNY nose hair trimmers, and above them, holly and lights and finally, the grand concourse that still holds the giant eagle and the giant organ and--holy shit!--the light show screen itself, green with dimmed Christmas lights and the dark outlines of Frosty the Snowman and toy soldiers.

"I ... love Christmas" are the only words I can get out, until, "I am ... so ... into this." Reyna and I must look like we both just dropped acid. It feels like years since we've stepped into a place so perfectly, so acutely attuned to our senses of all that is right and holy and ancient regarding the sanctity of spending money. We are ready for this.

And up the escalators we go, my boyhood fear still partly raging because look! Reyna's shoelace has come loose! The escalator could eat her whole! Hurry up and tie that! And as soon as the nice lady sits us down and delivers our tea sandwiches--the saddest, most swollen (and therefore somehow sweet and charismatic) tea sandwiches ever, bloated with puffy white egg salad and store-bought Wonder Bread--the organ pipes in and I am overcome with a teary feeling. Hey, maybe we are on drugs.

Because as the light show goes through its age-old postwar cuckoo-clock skit, I have a wave of nostalgia-borne endorphins washing through me that is almost unbearable. They always say the holiday season is the time of the year when people are most likely to kill themselves, but you don't often hear the other side of that: It's also the time when grown men will gaze upon department stores and otherwise totally unbearable family gatherings and nearly weep with a sense of what a wonderful world this is; how merciful a God there is that lets this thing called American Christmas go on and on; that children, as awful and snarky as they've become even in our lifetimes, still get to believe in this magnificent mirage we call the Holidays.

Meanwhile, the light show is seizuring green and white and red, and believe me, it's gorgeous. Reyna turns to me and says but one thing before squeezing my hand:

"I have to come back here and videotape this!" Agreed.

But then, something strange. Equally emotional, possibly terrible, definitely rousing, but also possibly nice and right and virtuous. As the light show is rounding its last corner--my favorite part, when Rudolph and Frosty and the cuckoo clocks and the toy soldiers and the Salvation Army Band Bears are all engaged in a freestyle jam, everyone and everything dancing at once--the familiar Christmas pipe organ music somehow (it's magic!) morphs into "God Bless America." Whereupon the most enormous flag you've ever seen slowly begins to rise, hoisted on a sort of moving scaffold, across the light show motherboard. Only the toy soldiers at the top remain in their living, breathing, lighted state, soon enough covered by the flag.

At first view of the flag, there's almost a gasp--the light show hasn't changed much in decades. Then a surge of grownups hooting and hollering and applauding; I even think I hear a giant "yes!" emanate from the table behind.

The kids, not really knowing from patriotism, fall into line and join in. And then it hits me, and it hits me hard, an awful twist in my gut: The flag is a direct reference to the tragedy. It wouldn't have been there otherwise. And now, it--the tragedy, the bastards, the war--is even muddying the waters of the purest, most American creation ever: Christmas itself, the Christmas we know, the Christmas that is, by now, a force of economic and emotional nature. And now, here in the grand old department store, hemmed in by the kids and the scarves and the foot massagers, this is where I start to feel it again, I mean, really feel it: loss.