On Christmas.

Some of you may have read this. Some of you may have not. I wrote this about three years ago (baked) but I'm pretty sure it still rings true.

Friday, December 19, 2003


Christmas seems like such a good idea. I'm glad I'm a Jew.

So here's the deal. Even though I'm a raging Jew, Jappy McYid, I love the idea of Christmas. I love the holly and yew, and spruce. I love red and green. I love popcorn and cranberry garlands, white lights on dark spruce trees. Trees and shiny sparkly glass ornaments and white snowflakes. I love candycanes, big and small, red and green (especially the green ones), jars tied with red and green tartan, and candles, deep red or buttery white, and those ornaments that bubble (I used to call them up-and-downs when I was really little). I love hearing ancient christmas carols, dark choral voices echoing solemnly through cavernous medieval cathedrals in England or Germany, or a brass quartet playing Renaissance ayres. I could fall asleep to Nat King Cole and Bing Crosby, and Brenda Lee, and The Andrews Sisters, all crooning lulling Christmas Cheer into the microphones. I love Burl Ives and Currier and Ives. I love Christmas smells -- cinnamon and pie spices, dark and clovy, and sagey, with allspice. I love smelling fire smoke and mulled cider, and citrus and coffee and hot whiskey and pine and cold. I love that all the stores are decked out with red glasses and green and white tablesettings, and there are "Great Christmas Gifts!" everywhere, and people bustling in and around the mall, dressed warmly carrying bags of gifts that they're going to give to their families, as they swarm the mall at NINE at NIGHT! I love seeing your breath as you're crunching over ice and snow walking through the neighborhood at night to see other people's christmas lights, and when the entire neighborhood is covered in luminaries, the street looking like it's a runway for Santa's sled... I love seeing smoke curl out of chimneys, and I love the blast of hot air opening the doors to the fireplace, and burning my hands as I rake the coals in the fireplace evenly, before adding more logs. I love cheesy christmas commercials with glazed turkeys and hams and bowls of other christmassy, fatty, New Year's-Diet-Resolution-causing food, bowls of punch, trays of muffins and bars and individual cherry cheesecakes, and chocolate cheesecake minibites, and bowls of nuts and candy, and slices of fruit cake, rummy and gross, stuck with iridescent red and green and orange and yellow candied fruit peels. I love leftovers and christmas cookies, wrapped in red and green Saran wrap. I love getting cards from other people, who you know sat down one night wearing red flannel pyjamas -- the dog at her feet and snow falling outside. On the desk, a lamp with a red shade lights her as she smiles and lovingly pens your card. I love people going to midnight mass, the vaulted hundred-year-old interior of the church mighty in its dignity, softly lit so that shadows swoop through ribs of flying buttressed arches, candles burn still, and red ribbons adorn the pews, a large christmas tree off to one side, wreaths on the doors, a red mantle on the pulpit. O Come O Come Emmanuel echoes through the church, as well as Mendehlsson's "Hosianna in der Hoh," "Heilig, Heilig, Heilig is Gott der Herr, Sebaoth..." echoing as the chords build. Afterward, everyone drinks eggnog laced with nutmeg and rum.

That's my romanticized christmas. I know that Christmas is stressful and frenetic, cooking and cleaning, toys and wrapping paper, traffic jams, and sleet, malls packed with nasty, ill-tempered, swollen gouty fat people yelling at their crying children.

For the last 13 years, I've spent most Christmasses in Florida -- we used to visit my grandmother, and in the 3 years since her death, I've been sort of home for christmas, and have realized -- just how much I love not being in a Christmas-centric environment. I've realized I love the idea, and not the reality of christmas. When we'd spend Christmasses in Ft. Lauderdale, everyone was Jewish. Christmas was a day on the beach, a movie, and chinese food later that night, ivory colored menorahs with orange or blue lights shining out from screened-in porches and small double-hung Florida-Condo windows, with flamboyant yellowed 70's windowshades half-down above the electric menoras. Palm trees rustled, lit from below with yellow and blue floodlights, and as fountains in the pools of water recirculate the water to keep it from stagnating.

I don't want to go home this year for Christmas. Christmas for Jews is sort of a dull ache when you're not completely removed from it. In Maryland, Christmas is so deathly boring. NOTHING is open. It's usually gray outside. Everything is brown. There's dirty snow in piles on the side of the road, left over from a storm two weeks before. You have no tree. You have no meal prepared. We always have other Jews over, and we all sit around, eating crackers and dip and some crazy Gazpacho my father made. There's usually a dry poundcake or apple monstrosity for dessert. Why do we EAT apple desserts?! They're AWFUL. No more apfelkuchen. The mothers get drunk and laugh at everything, the kids play in the basement, everyone has coffee, and has a great time, thinking -- would I be having even MORE fun if I were a Christian, sitting around in a green sweater eating ham?

I think the answer is probably no. For Christmas, I usually sit on the beach and eat ice cream. I don't have to go to church, and I don't have to say grace. We eat orange beef and sweet and sour chicken, and hot and sour soup, and then we go to bed, knowing that the next day, we won't have to take down the fire hazard spilling needles all over the carpet, and most importantly, that when we wake up, EVERYTHING WILL BE ON SALE!!!


Yeah. My memories are the same. My love of Christmas is the same. And my gratitude that I don't have to get thrown into the mix endures.