The New Yorker recently posted an Updike essay on “Christmas Cards” that first appeared in a December 22, 1997 issue. In it, Updike recalls Christmas at the Philadelphia Avenue house, where the “taste of Christmas in the little Pennsylvania town of Shillington—one of the more penetrating in my life’s bolted meals—was compounded of chocolate-flavored piety, as sweetly standardized as Hershey’s Kisses, and a tart, refreshed awareness of where one stood on the socioeconomic scale.”