My most vivid memories of Aunt Loopy are all from New Year's Day, probably because this was the only time I ever saw her. Loopy, or Lupchinette (as Grandma used to call her[1]) liked to celebrate the new year by painting everything in the house with a thin coating of petroleum jelly. She said that according to folk wisdom this practice would help ensure a greasy, shiny, waterproof year, and frankly her position was hard to argue with. The only one who even tried was Cousin Boxy -- and we had all long since stopped paying any attention to his opinions. "Cousin" Boxy was actually my mother's sister's boyfriend's barber's mechanic's uncle's piano instructor's neighbor, but we always thought of him as a cousin out of sentiments of laziness.

No family New Year's get-together was complete without an appearance by Uncle Carlyle. Unfortunately, as there was no one named Carlyle anywhere in the extended family, we had to be content with a slightly incomplete New Year's. Nevertheless, we had quite a good time.

[1] Grandma, like many American grandmothers of her generation, spoke in a European fashion that hinted at an early-20th-century youth spent on the far side of the Atlantic. However, since we all knew for a fact that our own Grandma had spent her entire life in Chicago, we had the impression that in her case the Old World accent was a bit of an affectation.