Christmas is a difficult time to be at large in a strange city. Everything shuts down: museums, shows, shops, restaurants. Finding a meal can be difficult. I tend to get the lonelies.

What to do?

Well, Jean and I and Bill and Judy got on a plane and headed west to the wine country city of Mendoza, in the foothills of the Andes.

At this point, I can't resist making a convoluted parenthetical remark before resuming my narrative. As they say nowadays, that's the way I roll.

Notice that the fields of grapevines as seen from the plane window are not laid out on a rectilinear compass grid, thus making the countryside look more like Europe than the USA. U. S. farmland looks orderly because during the early 19th Century, teams of surveyors were sent out from Washington to lay out townships and measure our new country. Since none of the land was occupied, they could place boundaries anywhere they wanted, so they set the standard township to be six miles square, or 23,040 acres. They aligned townships with the four compass points, and so divided the land into uniform squares as far as the eye could see. That's why the midwest looks so boring from the air.

Clearly, this kind of anal-retentive platting wasn't done near Mendoza. Full points to Argentina if you ask me.

The idea for our side trip was to hole up in a resort during Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Our travel agent, Melissa Vertiz, arranged for us to stay at Club Tapiz, to be cosseted through the holiday blues.

Tapiz is a working winery. Here we have a vineyard making grapes, olive trees olivulating, and behind all that, the Andes, quietly glaciating in the summer sun.

Our bedrooms are in a separate villa that's bigger than my house. We have our own swimming pool and we have a couple of big, ratty dogs who have adopted us. It's so quiet that Bill thinks something must be wrong.

Club Tapiz has the best restaurant we've visited in Argentina. It's better than any in San Miguel de Allende for that matter. Dishes are imaginative: grilled Camembert with pine nuts and honey; exquisite lamb chops in "American mustard sauce" which turns out to be an artisanal mustard and basalmic vinegar reduction; apple pie with homemade ginger ice cream.

The kitchen is supplied from a fine vegetable garden. Sweet corn, tomatoes, peppers, green beans and squash are brought to the table minutes after picking. Some of our breakfast fruits come from peach, quince and pear trees growing alongside the vegetable plot.

The saint who is responsible for this lovely place has constructed a wonderful compost pile, the hallmark of the true organic gardener. On the right, a chef snips fresh herbs for tonight's Christmas Eve dinner.

I'm writing this in a comfortable living room, wallowing in the luxury of a WiFi hot spot. A nice lady brings me a double espresso. I sit in soft, overstuffed furniture and gaze at paintings on the walls. Straight ahead is one called: Eva leaves her hometown of Junín.

Eva again! What's with you people?

My eye wanders to a painting to my right. Hmmm. Now this is interesting.

What is the artist trying to say here? That life can be insecure? That an errant breeze can put one into an unforeseen situation? What do you think?

Bill, Judy and Jean are all getting massages and facials. I'm getting fat. For me, this is a very, very different way of passing the holidays.

To all of you, my best wishes for a wonderful Christmas. As we say in Argentina, Fröhliche Weihnachten.