My happy, cider-scented Christmas associations would fall under a dark cloud in 1974. For the first time, I would be forced to face the truth about the holiday and to readjust everything I’d previously thought. As of that year, Christmas lost its innocence, and took on a frightening new meaning:
The Birth of the Baby Jesus.
In a way, Jews view Christmas with more religious zeal than most (non-Evangelical) Christians. None of my Gentile friends puts Jesus at the center of their holiday swirl. They talk about cooking for twenty, five cartloads at Target, massive Visa bills, flying to Toledo. When asked about the once-a-year golden opportunity to worship their Lord and Savior, they roll their eyes. If all goes according to plan, maybe they can squeeze in five minutes for Jesus between forcing fruitcake on the Labrador, polishing the good silver, and guzzling gallons of eggnog. Christmas for Gentiles can mean a million different things. For Jews, it’s all Jesus, all the time.
“Which temple are you going to join?”
“Are you Reformed or Conservative?”
“Have you set a date for your older daughter’s Bat Mitzvah?”
Alison, my sister, was in fifth grade and eleven years old. But this was, apparently, way too late for her to have any hope of having a Bat Mitzvah in a “good place,” as the Short Hillites informed my parents. Mom and Dad were advised to get their tukases in gear if they wanted to lock in a date for me and my seven-year-old brother, Jon.
My mom insists now that social pressure was not the reason my parents decided to join a temple, B’nai____ (Reformed). Nor was it the horrified reactions of neighbors when we casually mentioned our shady past of celebrated Christmas. The reason for joining, as Mom and Dad explained to us at the time, was ripe opportunity. In the spirit of fresh starts and due diligence, my parents were going to give us what their parents had failed to give them—a formal Jewish education. That meant Hebrew school on the weekends and observing major Jewish holidays.
Hanukkah was the first up after joining the temple. Despite my parents’ commitment to the Semitic cause, they remained clueless about how to observe, and they certainly weren’t going to ask the judgmental new neighbors for tips. My mother had only a vague idea of what to do that first night of Hanukkah. We didn’t have a menorah, so Mom tore eight holes in a kitchen sponge and filled them with pink birthday cake candles. She lit all eight candles at once, and we watched them burn down to the sponge. Mom threw the singed yellow rectangle into the sink and rinsed it in cold water. Then she handed out wrapped presents to the kids. My sister, brother, and I each got a six-pack of tube socks.
Disappointment is a severely underrated emotion. And it didn’t begin to address our concern that a burnt sponge and tube socks were replacing our beloved Christmas. “So what if Christmas was the day Christ was born?” we cried. “Jesus was a Jew!” we stated repeatedly. It went on like this for eight crazy nights. Meanwhile, the Gentile world was spinning into a frenzy of joy at the coming of Christmas. I despised our self-imposed sanctions, and felt a bit of Jewish guilt for hating Hanukkah by comparison. The resentment increased daily.
And then, a glimmer of hope. A few days before Christmas, Dad announced, “We made plans for a ski trip. We leave on Christmas Eve.”
My sister, brother, and I rejoiced! We were to escape the oppression of exclusion! As it turned out, we weren’t original with this strategy. The traditional Jewish activity of choice on Christmas—besides dinner at Kung Fu Palace and a movie—was travel. Since the goyim were home consuming pork and cocktails on Christmas Eve and Day, the Jews of Short Hills took to the empty skies, venturing to Florida, the Bahamas, Mexico. The Gentiles could have the Virgin Mary. The Jews would take the Virgin Islands.
My dad had always been a devout skier, and since we were way too late to make a reservation anywhere south of Short Hills, we were to head north, to Sugarloaf, in Maine.
We drove. Even at nine years old, I realized my parents were crazy to attempt it. Five people, several suitcases, and loads of ski equipment made for a cramped wagon. I had terrible car sickness, and we had to stop so I could vomit on the side of the highway. My brother squirmed and hummed annoyingly. My sister’s severe adult claustrophobia is probably rooted in that drive. We stopped in Portsmouth, the last outpost in New Hampshire, for dinner. The waitress brought our lobster rolls, and my mother said, “Hooray! We’re on the border of Maine!” We’d been on the road six hours already.
Dad said, “Halfway there!”
My sister sobbed.
My brother hummed.
I threw up.
Hours and hours later, when we got to Sugarloaf, we saw why last-minute reservations were possible. The ski lodge was still under construction. The residential condos were only partially wired for electricity. Our two rooms—meaning, a living room/bedroom and a bathroom—didn’t have reliable heat. The good news, my dad told us when we checked in, was that the mountain had three feet of fresh powder and that the skiing would be excellent. Good news for him. We kids were only four feet tall.
We never set ski to slope, anyway. The next day, Christmas, we woke up to the ping of sleet on the roof. From our condo window, we watched golf ball–size ice nuggets bounce in the parking lot. It was just as cold inside. Fully dressed in ski clothes with our hoods up and mittens on, we asked if we could watch TV. “Sorry,” said Mom. “The room doesn’t have one.” We asked if we could go to a movie. The nearest movie theater, or library, or anything, was three hours away. It sank in that we were in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do in a freezing room on Christmas. But, Mom said, “We’re together.”
For Christmas dinner, we went to the ski lodge. We were the only customers there. The sole person working was a grumpy middle-aged woman who kept looking at her watch. We ate the one option on the menu: beef chili with cheddar cheese. Sitting on plastic chairs at a plastic table and pointedly ignoring the malevolent stares of the grump, we ate quietly and quickly. I’m sure each of us was thinking about the Christmas dinner of the year before: the roast turkey and stuffing, gravy, cranberry sauce, shrimp cocktail, cheese puffs, hot cider with cinnamon, and unlimited cookies and candy. Mom said, “This is the best beef chili with cheddar I’ve ever tasted.” We would all continue to taste it for days.
Back at the condo, Dad surprised everyone by digging into his suitcase and removing a rolled-up piece of green fabric. He unfurled it and presented a green triangle with colored circles sewn onto it, a brown rectangle on the bottom—a cotton Christmas tree. Dad used the top loop to hang the tree from the closet door.
Alison said, “Dad, that’s cheating.”
A man of few words, Dad smiled and shrugged.
We laughed with illicit joy at our rebel father and soaked in the smallest symbol of Christmas in our frozen, shoebox-size condo.
Still hoping to get some skiing in, we waited another day for the sleet to stop. It didn’t, so we drove home, arriving in Short Hills in the middle of the night. Mom and Dad carried us to bed.
When we woke up and stumbled downstairs the next morning, my sister, brother, and I were shocked to find a pinball machine in the living room. Not an arcade model. About one-third the size, with yellow plastic legs and a colored cardboard playing surface, it had shiny silver balls and moving flippers. It lit up and made beep sounds when a ball hit a bumper (until the batteries died). We loved it. I had no idea when Mom and Dad bought and/or assembled it. We hugged them in gratitude. They stood watching us with mugs of steaming coffee in their hands and weary-yet-relieved expressions on their faces, having managed to pull off Christmas despite the forces of God and man that were standing in the way.
We resumed our Frankel Christmas tradition the following year. Our neighbors and classmates frowned upon it. I started to give people the explanation I continue to recite about thirty times each season: “We’re Jews but we celebrate Christmas. For us, it’s not about the birth of Jesus, of course. It’s a secular, American observance.” This explanation didn’t fly with the religious
leaders at B’nai ____. A letter arrived at our house on temple letterhead. “It has come to our attention that some of you have a Christmas tree in your houses and call it a Hanukkah bush,” read the note. “This is unacceptable. Jews cannot celebrate any aspect of Christmas. There’s an oil crisis in America, and it is essential to uphold the Jewish traditions and be unified in our actions. All those Gentiles you think are your friends, given the choice between Jews and oil, they’d pick oil.”
My mother called up the temple director and said, “If the priest at St. Rose of Lima said at church, ‘Given the choice between Catholics and oil, the Jews would pick oil,’ you’d have the Anti-Defamation League over there before you could say Hanukkah ten times fast.” Which, actually, wouldn’t be that fast.
The infamous “they’d pick oil” letter thereby ended our association with B’nai ____. My sister, brother, and I never had Bar or Bat mitzvahs, or much of a Jewish education. Dad announced that he would earmark the temple membership fees for a ski vacation each year instead. He kept that promise. And over the years we have skied across the country, from Vermont to Wyoming.
Needless to say, we never went back to Maine.
Now that I’m an adult with (Jewish) children of my own, we celebrate Hanukkah the right way. We say the prayers in Hebrew and English. We light the candles from right to left on a proper menorah. I give small gifts each night at sundown. I make latkes.
We also celebrate the Frankel family secular, American-style Christmas—baking cookies, buying gifts for the extended family to put under the heavily laden tree—at Mom and Dad’s house. Sometimes we go to Short Hills, sometimes to their farm in Vermont. Doesn’t matter where we are because, as Mom says, “We’re together.” The family is bigger now. Louder. We still run out for emergency batteries, eat unthinkable amounts of food, and open presents in our pajamas. I watch with a steaming mug of coffee in my hand, a weary-yet-relieved expression on my face. Each year, we retell the story of the pinball machine. It’s part of the tradition now. And each year, the adults rejoice, having managed to pull off Christmas again, despite the forces of God and man that are always standing in the way.
CHRISTMAS IN PARIS
Mike Albo
While driving me to the train after visiting last Christmas, my Republican but understanding father told me next time I could bring someone home with me. All I could say in response was a cheery “Okay!” while I looked at the Northern Virginian vista of plazas and neo-Colonial homes.
I can’t imagine bringing someone home for Christmas. You and your gay partner (what everyone would call him before you two arrived) would have to be groomed like grooms, dressed in carefully fitted American Apparel clothes that didn’t look too matchy-matchy, conversing with semi-masculine voices about your career and cars.
If I could jam my byzantine, vague relationships with men into a tightly wrapped gift, I would. My affairs don’t fit easily into one seat at the dining room table.
“Hi Mom, hi Dad! This is F. I just met him on Saturday! We made out at the Slide, and then my friend Bill said that he had had sex with him last week and that it was great!”
“Hi Mom, hi Dad! This is R. We hook up occasionally, but then he always ends up talking about his stupid boyfriend in Berlin so I am not allowed to feel anything significant for him!”
“Hi Mom, hi Dad! This is G and S. They are a couple who kind of have sex with me but also have sex with other guys, too!”
When I was thirty, I fell in love with this guy who I had barely had sex with who had an “open relationship” with his boyfriend. Let’s call him G. (I would try to make up a full fictional name for him, but right now I can’t think of one that doesn’t have pre-attached meaning to it. So let’s just stick with initials.) He was blond and lunky and had a face on the angelic side of looks. His boyfriend, S, was a sexy, acrobatic, freckly dancer who was often out of town traveling with a dance company. Their apartment was decorated in perfectly shabby chic furniture and items they brought back from their trips to Zimbabwe, Thailand, and Guatemala: headdresses, conch shells, worn-in wooden beads, and chandeliers with oyster interiors. They would walk around their apartment shirtless, hosting parties, and doing tons of drugs that never seemed to affect their toned bodies. They had a dreamy array of friends from their travels and S’s dance company tours: A British girl who I found out later was a Lady. A brooding, gorgeous French actor with a promising career. Two angularly handsome, intelligent brothers from Brittany, who insisted, with genuine, un-American sincerity, that I come visit them.
It was 2000, and G lived a rambling, fabulously worldly lifestyle that matched that spotlessly positive year. He seemed to have money from somewhere, and would spend a lot of time on Orbitz or CheapTickets.com finding amazing deals to Mexico, Costa Rica, Los Angeles. We began to take trips together. He would call me up, and in a week I would be on another plane with him and S, to another beach or city or hotel, a Lover Without Borders. Foolishly openhearted, I suppose I was in love with S, too. He seemed welcoming and happy to have me around, and we kissed when we were drunk.
I don’t think I really set out to sleep with them, but slowly, over the year, I did, between them—sort of sexually but sort of not, like I was a house cat. I was caressed; they laughed at my jokes and fed me. When S was gone, G gave me more attention, and we would make out. But it was kept above the belt, so it seemed “okay.”
I know how completely unhealthy it sounds, but remember, it was 2000, before the paradigm shift, and it seemed right at the time. I think I had a job then, but I just remember buying CDs with G, chatting with him constantly on my new Nokia cell phone, and charging sashimi deluxe dinners for us on my MasterCard, calmly trusting that somehow in the blue, confident glow of our boom economy, all would be easily paid off by day-trading for a couple of hours. I was like an Enron executive of desire, bloated with confidence.
But also like a white-collar criminal; in the back of my mind I knew this idyllic arrangement was doomed. I spent the year with them, in various hotel rooms from Chicago to Zihuatanejo, accruing debt, believing the hype, waiting for a significant moment, I guess, when G would look at me, next to a lakeside landscape or other beautiful, expensively lit location, and tell me, finally, how strongly he felt. Everything would fall in place, and either G would break up with S and devote himself to me, or, even better, the three of us would get married and live a fantastic, slightly Euro life that bent conventions.
G’s self-made life made me question the whole “This is my boyfriend!” schematic that kept me feeling inadequately single every Christmas. He was thrilling and made me feel expansive, like the smell of airports. He was an alluring, beckoning, blue-eyed escape.
One night, in early December, G and I were drinking dollar beers ironically at the Dugout, an old West Village gay bar. G also had a little baggie of coke. (Lord knows how I did that drug back then. The next day I would always wake up sick, looking rapidly aged and part lizard, like I was in special-effects makeup.)
G grabbed me by the waist. “I bought you a ticket to Paris for Christmas.” We would fly there, spend the night, and then S would join us, coming from Geneva, where he was rehearsing a dance performance. The three of us would travel to Brittany and spend Christmas Eve with the two angularly handsome, intelligent Breton brothers and their parents at their converted farmhouse on the outskirts of Rennes.
I made one feeble gesture of hesitation. “I don’t know. My parents would be so disappointed.”
Hopped up, G hugged me and bit me on the neck. “Screw your parents.” he said. “Let me be your daddy.” He followed it up by looking at me with blue eyes that lit up like gas jets. I bent and bent my Prevacid cardboard beer coaster into four fibrous tatters.
Listen, reader, I know I shouldn’t have gone. Trust me: years have passed; I have shoveled myself out of debt and acknowledged my faults. In our country it’s impossible to do anything rash and passionate without immediately being confronted by all the self-killing therapist-speak f
loating in the air like soft Muzak: I keep choosing men I can’t have. I avoid serious, fortifying relationships in favor of “destructive” ones. I am insecure or narcissistic or obsessive-compulsive or whatever else. I know, I know, I know.
Before you roll your eyes and think I am just a silly, ranting queer, let me ask you: Would YOU have turned down a ticket to Paris for Christmas with a totally hot guy? Ask of yourself, my reader, and then, ye be the judge of me.
I was on Flight 929 to Paris, seat 28F, dead center of the airplane. G was to my left. He gave me a Valium and bought us three small bottles of Cabernet. He gazed at the flight attendant, and she gave us an extra bottle. There was such promise in everything around me—in the twinkling seat belt lights and soft, square blankets and rhombus-shaped chicken breasts. An old man sat to my right reading a book entitled In Quest of Nirvana—a wink from the universe of what was to come.
We got off the plane, and G knew exactly where to direct our taxi. There was a fresh wind blowing, the mild temperature of a floral refrigerator. G had reserved a hotel room in Montmartre, where buildings sprout out of steep streets and look crooked. We walked past shops, with cheeses and fruits arranged in the window like Gourmet magazine covers. Everyone passing by wore their scarves and peacoats with effortless style. Schoolchildren in cute uniforms ran by giggling. I had walked onto the set of my own private Moulin Rouge.
The Worst Noel Page 8