Article: "Merry Christmas, Darling: a daughter pays loving tribute to her late mother's remarkable spirit.

If Charles Dickens had lived in 20th-century New York, he would have modeled his ebullient Ghost of Christmas Present on my mother, Josephine Premice, poster diva for joie de vivre. In the updated Christmas Carol, the spirit admonishing Scrooge to stop being such a penny-pinching misanthrope and belly up to the banquet of life would be an angular, rhinestone-bedecked Broadway singer, dancer and actress with a gravelly voice and a raucous, throaty laugh. My mother seized Christmas as a God-given opportunity to express her infinite love of mankind--and shopping. She saw to it that the holiday was a magical adventure for our family, a celebration of abundance both culinary and ...

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