7.
As a Jewish adult living in a Christian world, I find that most people generally assume everyone celebrates Christmas. And that’s okay. We get to wade in some of the joy and jingle without having to do any of the heavy lifting. “Merry Christmas!” a clerk will say as I leave a store. “Merry Christmas to you, too!” I’ll say, like I’m one with humanity. I know people mean it more in a polite way—more akin to “Have a good weekend!” than “Happy birth of Jesus!”—so I typically just go along with it. On the rare occasion where I do say, “Well, actually, I’m Jewish, so I don’t celebrate Christmas, I celebrate Hanukkah,” there’s this awkward apologizing and backtracking. “Have a great New Year,” we’ll agree, and that’s always a nice peace offering.
(It does happen, and not infrequently, I should say, that someone who knows I’m Jewish will be confused about how I, as a Jewish person, operate in the month of December. If I had a dime for every time someone said to me, “I know you’re Jewish, but you still, like, celebrate Christmas, right?” I would be set for life in Hanukkah gelt.)
8.
It’s 2005. I have a family of my own. Our youngest child just turned eight. Our kids have never had a Christmas, good or bad.
We have Shabbat dinner every Friday, and we say the prayers. In addition to Passover and the high holidays, we’ve added Purim, Sukkoth, and Simchat Torah to our holiday shindig repertoire. Our oldest child is studying for his Bar Mitzvah. Pre-marriage, I backpacked through Israel, and my folks have traveled there twice in the last few years. Our journey, our transformation, is by no means unique—it is true for so many of the Jewish families I know in all corners of the country.
While Jason and I still cherish our merry pair of Gladys stockings, the box we unpack every December contains not ornaments but a collection of menorahs our kids have made over the years. Hanukkah no longer feels small to me. It feels big—big, bright, good, and full of chocolate.
THAT’S JUST ABOUT ENOUGH
FIGGY PUDDING, ACTUALLY
Catherine Newman
You can’t always put your finger on it, can you? What it is exactly that makes the holidays feel like one big sucked-sharp candy cane poking into your eye? I mean, if one of those little blinking bulbs shorts out and your Tannenbaum goes up in flames, setting fire first to the paisley drapes and then to the exposed beams, and finally burning your whole house to the ground while you stand outside in the sleet in your long underwear, watching—well, you can certainly put your finger on that. Or maybe the repo man comes to your door dressed up as Santa Claus and he’s all, Ho ho ho, give me the keys to the Honda. That always sucks. Orit’s 1877 in Minnesota, and you’re Pa Ingalls, harebrained prairie patriarch, shivering in a snow cave while the blizzard rages outside, and after you’ve kept yourself alive for three days on Christmas candy and oyster crackers, it turns out you’re not even fifty yards from the very sod house on the banks of Plum Creek where your wife and three daughters are tatting their lace! Now, there’sa good story about a bad Christmas.
But sometimes nothing happens—really, there’s an almost otherworldly absence of anything happening, and the kids don’t even wake up barfing all over their holiday pajamas—but each irritating non-thing is like a little Yuletide ant under your shirt until you’re just clawing at your own skin and glugging Benadryl from the bottle.
Maybe it starts with the tree. Wouldn’t it be fun to go to one of those pick-your-own Christmas tree farms? No. It wouldn’t. But since you’ll go anyway, why don’t you run ahead and tip the teenagers five dollars to not offer your husband a saw to cut the tree down himself? Because even though Michael, my own man-person, is someone who’ll happily tie on an apron before getting down on his hands and knees to scrub the crusty floor of the oven, and even though he can stand comfortably in the feminine hygiene aisle trying to remember if I said “Super” or “Super Plus”—as soon as he sees a forest and a saw, his Inner Manliness is going to demand that he wrangle some poor tree into submission. The teenagers might as well ask, “Hey, do you want the saw to cut it down yourself? Or would you prefer that we staple the word pussyto your back and cut it down for you?” And whatever it is that you picture—maybe his standing in a dry sort of way and moving his arm back and forth like one of those windmill lawn-ornament lumberjacks until the whole tree snaps unequivocally over—it’s nothing like that.
What it’s like is Michael kneeling in the mud and melty snow, ducking under the low branches that are welting up the back of his neck and depositing sap into his hair, while he hacks at the place he imagines the trunk might be. Don’t forget helpful me—“It’s a saw, honey, not an axe”—or Michael’s expleting of the words shit and then fuck when the tree starts to bend one way and then teeters sideways before, at the last second, crashing down over his kneeling back. You can “Good King Wenceslas” all you want in the car driving home—nobody’s going to join in.
Then come the inconsequential holiday misunderstandings. “Hey,” I say to Michael, when we’re warm and dry again. “Would you mind getting the tree skirt down for me?” “Sure,” he says, and disappears into the attic. Meanwhile Ben, who is five, has plunked himself down in front of the tree stand, elbows on the ground, chin on his fists. He lies there unblinking for five or so minutes before I say, “What’s up, Kittycat?” “Well,” he says, “you said the tree was thirsty, and I’m waiting to see if it’s going to drink.” I picture what he’s picturing—some throated sort of hole opening up in the trunk and gulping water—and am suddenly reminded of my mother saying I needed to wear cotton underpants so my vagina could “breathe.” I used to sit in my second-grade classroom, terrified that everyone would hear it choking and gasping for air under my nylon tights. (Of course, decades later, in an Ashtanga yoga class, it did once sigh audibly. But I don’t think this is what my mom had in mind.)
We’re still in front of the tree, Ben and I, waiting for it to drink, when Michael returns. “I couldn’t find it in any of the clothes bins,” he says. “Is it a skirt that’s shaped like a Christmas tree? Or does it just have a tree patternon it? To tell you the truth, I can’t even remember your wearing it.”
Oy vey.
Next comes an excursion to the Christmas Loft Holiday Emporium, where Ben is hoping to purchase an Advent calendar. I have promised to make him one— complete with many liftable flaps and many cute pictures of cute animals opening cute presents—but Ben wants a “real one.” And by “real” he means, of course, shrink-wrapped.“ A real Advent calendar?” he muses in the car, like the little half-Jew expert he is. “An actual one? I think you need to, you know, tear it open or rip it out of some sort of a package.” He pantomimes this rending with his fingers. Yes, of course. We’re not in a cave eking out our existence on oyster crackers, for God’s sake! It’s modern-day America. If it’s worth having, it’s worth wrapping in plastic. Our lives are like The Velveteen Rabbit, only “real” and “fake” have been switched around in some horrible existential inversion. “What?” Ben says. “What did you say?” And I say, “Oh, nothing. I guess I was just thinking aloud.”
What can a person really say about the Christmas Loft Holiday Emporium? It’s just like you knew it was going to be: the rooms are so velvety and hushed and dark, it’s as if you’re in a museum of the world’s most faceted jewels, only what there is to see is as earnest and pointless and frightening as a dog’s fancy sweater. Walls of complicated neo-heirloom ornaments. (I’m tempted to buy one for Michael with the words “Dear Husband” glitter-embossed on a plaid ceramic necktie.) A heavy, expensive snow globe in which Frosty’s snow head seems to have come loose and now wafts around decapitatedly with the glitter and flakes. Round-mouthed figurines, like so many little caroling versions of Munch’s The Scream. Surrounded by the holiday fumes—a cross between Pine-Sol, Atomic Fireballs, and clove cigarettes—and “White Christmas” leaking from the vents like so much toxic gas, murmured, it seems, by robots, Ben is in heaven.
He stops to ooh and ah over each f
ur-trimmed velvet stocking and glass candy cane and dreidel ornament (don’t even talk to me about the dreidel ornaments) until, eventually, we arrive at the sanctum sanctorum of the entire complex: the Room of the Miniature Villages. It is so beautiful to him that Ben actually gasps, says “Mama!” and takes my hand. Awe creates a nearly visible glow around the boy, though the space itself is dark, lit only by miniature streetlights and the glowing windows of the miniature Alpine chalets. I have to hold Ben up so he can admire the paths paved with Starlight Mints, the shimmery-shammery polyester snowbanks, the tiny skaters scratching their endless figure eights onto a magnetized plastic pond. “We should write a book about this,” Ben breathes. “About a kid who shrinks down and lives in this beautiful eentsy village, right here. Isn’t that a good idea?” This produces in me a distinct and immediate ka-ching feeling, complete with dollar signs in my eyeballs—That is a good idea!—only in the book I’d want to write, the little boy would walk through all the miniature houses, and instead of holiday roasts and cheer, there would just be lots of wires and battery packs and tags that said “Made in Korea” and “$79.99.” I don’t think this is the kind of enchanted story Ben has in mind.
On our way out of the Emporium, plastic-wrapped calendar in hand, I am molested by a larger-than-life singing electronic Santa Claus. It chortles merrily, then swats at my ass with its white-gloved hand. Ben tosses a frightened glance over his shoulder before uttering the words of the enlightened: “There are probably some kids, maybe some really little kids, who think that’s really the real Santa Claus? But it’s not!” When I don’t say anything, he adds, “Right?” and I say, “Right!” Though all I can think of is last summer’s Teddy Bear Rally on the town common, where Ben—after being roughly embraced by a plush-costumed entertainer—asked, “Was that a realpretend teddy bear?” And I had to say, from the very heart of semantic uncertainty, “I’m not sure.”
But Santa Claus. Here we arrive at the jolly hub of my holiday ennui. Because there’s no way out but through, if you know what I’m saying. Who wants to be the cynical jerk who refuses a child the pleasure of mystery and magic? Like, “Come on, Ben, climb back into your gray overalls so we can go wait in the bread line again.” A child must believe! Which is fine when they’re little, really, and the details of improbability are lost on them. Amazing Saint Nick! Flies around with flying reindeer and knows you want a Dr Pepper Bonne Bell Lip Smacker! But now Ben is a person grazing at the smorgasbord of logic—and Santa just doesn’t fit in with the sequence of numbers and “that’s why they’re called underwear.” Like one evening, we’re reading an old book called The Christmas Whale, about the year the reindeer are down with the flu and Santa leaves the North Pole on whaleback, with stacks of gifts he unloads at various ports around the world. Something about this representation of a trip across the enormous globe sets Ben’s gears to spinning.
“Wait,” Ben says, and chops his hand through the air in a gesture that means wait. “How many kids are there in the whole world?”
“There are about six billion people,” I say. “Maybe a quarter of those are kids—so maybe a billion and a half kids altogether. Picture grains of sand filling up a swimming pool.”
Ben sucks his thumb thoughtfully. “And is that more than the number of seconds in the whole night?”
“Yes.” I suddenly picture Santa biting into three billion oatmeal cookies in ten hours, gulping eight billion ounces of room-temperature milk. No wonder he’s so freaking fat.
“I know the part about the whale is a pretend story? But the real Santa has time to bring each child a present, all in one night?” Ben is chewing his cuticles now.
Two million chimney trips per second; Donner and Blitzen snorting diet pills and crank.
“Some families might have lots and lots of kids, so there are actually fewer stops,” I offer, lamely.
“Maybe,” Ben says. “But aren’t some kids Jewish and also other religions, like the kids who celebrate solstice and Drama Don?”
“Ramadan,” I say, and “Yes.”
“Well, does Santa bring gifts to those kids?”
“I guess not,” I say, “not if they don’t celebrate Christmas.” Because Santa is a bigot.
“Yes, but how does he know?” There is no way around Ben’s reasonableness.
His Dobermans sniff them out.
“He’s magic,” I say. “He just knows.”
“I don’t think so.” Ben sucks his thumb thoughtfully for a while. “I think he looks in your window, and if he sees a menorah—well, not just a menorah, like ours, but a menorah and no stockings or tree”—or ham— “then he flies away to the next house.”
Unbidden, a pornographic Norman Rockwell painting pops into my mind: a jolly Santa face peering into the holly-trimmed window of a bedroom where a naked couple is nakedly coupling. A naked Jewish couple, maybe with a framed Chagall print hanging above their bed.
Who knew Santa was a peeping anti-Semite?
And not only that, but a proliferating peeping anti-Semite. Here he is at Sears, with a sweating beard and a Burger King bag crumpled under his chair! There he is next door at Penney’s, his beard more yellow than white, a Dunkin’ Donuts bag crumpled under his chair! And there he is at the town holiday parade, grunting, “Sorry, kid,” before leaping onto the hayride ahead of Ben and galloping away on the last ride of the evening. Ho ho ho. Fuck you.
“And I guess,” Ben continues, “when he looks in your window, that’s how he figures out if you’ve been good or not.” I can’t tell if the peeper/stalker theory is more or less creepy than the concept of omniscience. (I imagine Santa borrowing God’s yellow legal pad scrawled with holy notes about the world’s children: “Stuck own tongue in outlet,” “Bludgeoned sister with Pooh slipper.”) Judging from Ben’s pulled-together eyebrows, I’m guessing more creepy. I tell him that all kids are good and Santa knows it, and Ben relaxes enough to reminisce about the fiberglass reindeer he saw pooping out real pretend poops.
Until Christmas Day. That morning, Ben plucks thing after thing from his stocking, and he is as gracious and lovely as those Little House on the Prairie daughters, with their bright tin cups and one copper penny each. (“Oh Pa, you didn’t!”) “Scotch tape!” he cries. “Band-Aids!” “Embroidery thread!” Ben is surrounded by his loot. “Santa really did know what I wanted!” And then he reaches to the near-bottom of my old woolen sock and pulls out the snow globe. We have painstakingly cut out and inserted into this snow globe a photo from our last vacation, of Ben smiling into the sun in his blue-hibiscus swimsuit. Ben shakes the globe appreciatively, watches all the flakes drift down, then squints inside and freezes at the sight of himself. “Oh my God,” he says, and his mouth drops open in horror. “Santa followed us to Mexico.”
BIRTHDAYS
Ann Patchett
Happy Christmases are all alike; every unhappy Christmas is unhappy in its own way. Or so it was in my family. There is a picture of a pretty, chubby toddler who was me, aged two, wearing a blue smocked dress in front of a blue flocked Christmas tree with dark blue glass balls (California circa 1965). My sister, Heather, age five and a half, is standing next to me in a red jumper. We look like girls who have plenty of presents and feel good about it. I don’t remember this day, but it is documented. A few years later our parents were divorced. My mother moved us from Los Angeles to Tennessee, where she married my stepfather and we started a new life. Lying in bed late at night with my sister that first Christmas Eve in Nashville, a few weeks after I’d turned six, I told her I heard sleigh bells on the roof. She in turn dispelled me of what was nothing more than idle Santa gossip. In retrospect, I think that Christmas and Santa should be inextricably bound together by a thick rope so that when you throw one off the roof the other has no choice but to go crashing over the gutters as well. If I had to give up California and flocking and smocking and my father AND Santa Claus, it would have been infinitely easier to just give up Christmas.
But this is not a sad story
about divorce or childhood. There were, after all, plenty of happy days. Flip through the photo album of memory and there we are: skating a little Sunfish across the lake in the silvery light of noon, or riding our horses, Sundance and Midnight, bareback through the woods. On balance, we were as happy or unhappy as any other family we knew. It was only our Christmases that were worse. For almost every other moment, we had mastered that level of normalcy that reconfigured families aspire to, but the season of peace and goodwill toward men unfailingly sent us straight to the pits. The lion’s share of the blame for this must rest on the shoulders of my stepfather, a good man who probably could not help but ruin the holidays for the rest of us because he himself had endured Christmases so biblically dreadful that he knew no other way. The lynchpin of this entire story lies in the fact that my stepfather shared a birthday with the baby Jesus, and so spent his entire childhood without a birthday present or a birthday party or even a nice birthday wish from his mother. Every Christmas wreath and stocking and package wrapped in reindeer-covered paper dredged up the whole horrible memory for him again, so that by Christmas morning he was nothing but a blur of grief. There was always a good bit of weeping beneath the tree in Tennessee.
There was weeping in California as well, as Christmas was the day that brought my otherwise stoically divorced father to his stoic knees. As soon as we heard the phone ring on Christmas morning, my sister and I would begin to sob like Pavlov’s depressed dogs. We didn’t like being so far away from him, but most of the year we lived with it. On Christmas morning we couldn’t live with it another minute. My father would cry and we would cry in turns, first my sister, as she was older, then me; then we would hand the receiver back and forth a few times to cry harder and louder just because we couldn’t help ourselves. We’d stay on until the whole phone was so thoroughly soaked that once I asked my sister if we might be electrocuted. She said I was an idiot.
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