The Worst Noel

by Collected Authors of the Worst Noel

  So let me take you to that planet, a place I’ll call Christmases in the Sixties and in the Seventies, or CRISIS for short. You’ll notice that the acronym’s trying too hard (and failing) but, hey, isn’t that just a dandy leitmotif for the family Christmases I experienced as a child?

  The first thing you should know about CRISIS is that everything’s in black and white—or at least that’s how I remember it. No, my memory’s deceiving me: It wasn’t black and white, each of which can be striking and appealing; it was gray (which was even spelt differently on our planet: grey). The weather was sludge grey (I can’t remember a single white Christmas), the streets were default grey, and the television—at once, our solitary refuge and our point of congregation—was monotonous grey. Grey is as uncolorful as color can be and yet it was the only color available to us on CRISIS.

  The mood too was grey. In between the twin orgies of present-opening and face-stuffing was just nothing. The mood was too anticlimactic to enjoy the presents, and since the Christmas “dinner,” invariably eaten between two and three in the afternoon, was several hours away, all one could do was guzzle (le mot juste) cheap candy—thus precipitating a series of sugar highs/lows that weren’t ameliorated by turning on the TV to see the cheesiest comedian of the day going around the children’s ward of a hospital to hand out presents to the kiddies.

  Lucky them, I used to think, at least they’re spared the misery of a family Christmas, and here, I suppose, is where I must depart from the general and tell you about my family’s Christmas. For although we inhabited planet CRISIS, we were far from being its only inhabitants, and as Tolstoy wrote in Anna Karenina (infact, it’s the very first line), “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Yup, that was us, unhappy in our own unique way.

  Funnily enough, the rest of the year we weren’t too bad. We were, I guess, no more dysfunctional than any other regularly dysfunctional family. Dad loved all three kids equally but never simultaneously; Mum loved us in descending order—which was okay by me, as I was the middle child between two sisters— but didn’t do much for the self-esteem of my younger sister, whose existence I had resented ever since her birth. (When I asked my hitherto omnipotent father to send her back, he explained that it was impossible—hence the “hitherto.”) The real fault line in the family was right at the top: Mum wanted a father, and Dad wanted a wife, and we wanted parents who were just like our friends’ parents. None of us got what we wanted. Even at the age of six, I knew that that much screaming wasn’t normal: “None of my friends’ parents behave like this,” I’d tell them when I’d summoned up the courage to emerge from underneath the bed (my refuge during their worst altercations). “How do you know what they’re like when you’re not there?” they’d counter, and I’d be obliged to accept their dubious logic—even though I knew. Oh yes, I knew.

  Sensing my suspicion, my mum would try to reassure me that their arguments and bickering were somehow healthy. “At least everything’s out in the open,” she’d tell me while I bit my lip, yearning for a family in which some things could be shut away. I didn’t know the word cathartic but I could understand the implication that, far from heralding a seismic family schism, it was these very rows that meant my parents wouldn’t divorce (like my friend Jonathan’s parents had), with all the stigma that that entailed back then in the grey 1960s.

  Letting it all hang out might have worked in latesixties California, but not on planet CRISIS, where there was no summer of love, just a winter of rancor.

  My fear and loathing of their self-expression—selfindulgence—was, in fact, my father’s fault. It was he who, in an attempt to turn me into as English a gentleman as it was possible for a Jewish kid from a Jewish suburb to be, sent me at the age of eight to a preparatory school—a private school that prepared you for a public school, which was also a private school. (Confused? You should be.) There I was bullied on three counts: I was Jewish. I was a day boy in a predominantly boarding school (yup, that’s the English way: you breed children and then send them off to be cared for by borderline pedophiles and sadists at the very earliest opportunity). And I was clever.

  I soon learned that to betray your feelings was a sign of weakness. Lips—especially upper ones— were to be kept as stiff as the collars we wore, and woe betide any boy who allowed his to tremble. Oh yes, I was being turned into a right little gentleman. I even managed to titter along with the rest of the class when Mr. Alston, the dapper little French teacher, told us that the word for cake was gâteau— “pronounced ‘gatt-oh,’ and not as they say in Golders Green”—a particularly Jewish suburb—“‘ghetto.’” How droll, and after all, it was at least twenty-three years since the liberation of Auschwitz.

  The truth about my Jewishness was that I was only really aware of it—in the breach as it were—at school. At home, we weren’t at all observant—hence our celebration of Christmas (we’d tried Hanukkah one year, but we’d all felt frustrated by the fact that it went on for over eight days without a single day of splurging and so had dropped it)—and since my home friends were all Jewish, it wasn’t an issue with them, either.

  However, I couldn’t help but bring my newfound sensibilities home with me, so that now when my parents started to yell at each other, I wouldn’t run away and hide, but would sit there disapprovingly deploring the ethnicity that had undoubtedly provoked their disagreement. For who was I not to universalize my own experiences? My parents argued loudly and they were Jewish; the people at school— the goyim—were (when they weren’t beating me up in one of the regular pogroms that triggered any amount of race memory) self-effacing and bottled up. There had to be a connection, and I, who had never heard of a syllogism, duly made it.

  The undeniable fact that a lot of the time my parents managed to get on perfectly well—there was always love there, even after they’d divorced (sometime later, when I was in my early twenties)—only served to make their rows worse. I think I could have endured constant antagonism more than the peripatetic bust-ups and love-ins, both of which at once included and excluded me.

  Still, what else did I know? And with my elder sister holding the whole family together like some sort of precocious Atlas, we siblings enjoyed as good a childhood as I, with the power of hindsight, could have wished for. Aside from the rows, there was much laughter and fun and warmth. The house was always filled with friends (though not extended family, as my parents conceived a dislike for each other’s family), and the summers in particular were halcyon days that I remember with enormous affection. I also recall them in color: the greens of the garden, the blue of the country club swimming pool, and the pinks of the blossoms that lined our suburban street.

  As opposed to the grey of Christmas. Over the years, I’ve given a lot of thought as to why it was so awful, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the day— the season—acts as a magnifying glass on the emotional health of a family. So if a family is happy, as a family, then Christmas will be especially happy; but if there are (as there were with my family) underlying faults and problems, then Christmas serves to exacerbate them.

  So, whereas our family could be perfectly happy at home or, interestingly enough, abroad—the pressures of a family holiday never got to my parents or to us, possibly because my parents were relaxed enough to be able to enjoy themselves and each other and also there was a sense of being united as a family in a foreign country; we might argue among ourselves but we always put on a united front to the world—put us all in the same room at the most miserable time of year (aye, with another three months of winter to come) and we turned into the cast of a Fassbinder movie, albeit without accusing each other of being Nazi murderers. Throw in a widowed grandmother disliked by her son and resented by her daughter-in-law, and you had the perfect recipe for the Christmas from Hell. Or, rather, you didn’t have it, WE did.

  Have a nice holiday season, won’t y’all.

  Postscript: Everything turned out fine in the end. I forgave my parents and lear
ned to love my younger sister—though never Christmas. As a husband and father, I took great care to avoid the mistakes of the family in which I grew up—thereby, of course, perpetrating any number of different mistakes. Nevertheless, we almost always go away for Christmas—usually somewhere hot and sunny and… and colorful.

  THE JEW WHO COOKED A HAM

  FOR CHRISTMAS

  Neal Pollack

  Nashville, Tennessee, is a very Christian place. You can’t go five minutes in December without hearing that damn “Christmas Shoes” song on the radio. So why don’t the stores have better food at Christmastime? In December 2004, as my wife, Regina, and I lurched through her mother’s neighborhood store, I felt my seasonal joy, never high to begin with, draining away under the gray-dim fluorescent lighting and because I couldn’t find any organic peanut butter. It was a perfectly ordinary American supermarket, but I walked the aisles as though it were a crematorium.

  Living in Austin, Texas, has spoiled me. The grocery stores are so good that people from Europe visit to study them. On its worst day, my neighborhood store has sixty different varieties of citrus. I’ve purchased three kinds of bleu cheese made by the Amish in Iowa. My two-year-old son asks to snack on peanut butter–flavored yogurt pretzels. His favorite food, other than ice cream, is capers. And we don’t spend any more money than we would at a regular store.

  As I walked around that non-Yuppie grocery store, my nose crinkled in disdain. My mouth curled into a sneer usually reserved for people who wear baseball caps backward.

  “This is horrible,” I said.

  “It’s not that bad,” Regina said.

  “How many different kinds of cereal can people actually eat?”

  “Yes, dear.”

  “Why do they call this a grocery store?”

  “Because,” she said, “this is a grocery store.”

  We arrived at protein alley. The fish looked like it had been in the deep freeze since June. I chose some tilapia for that night, December 23; I could render it inoffensive with tomatoes, garlic, and parsley. The beef, however, looked slimy, with a slight greenish tint beneath the wrapping. I nearly gagged at the sense memory of the sour-sweet smell that red meat gives off just as it’s going bad.

  “Look at this chicken,” I said. “It’s all… muscle.”

  Then I saw my dream food, enveloped in a golden glow. A sweet chorus of angels drowned out the tinny Christmas carol Muzak. It sat there alone on the shelf, the last survivor of its kind, in a light-brown burlap bag tied with a little metal ring.

  A Smithfield ham.

  I’d been dying to eat a Smithfield ever since I read an essay by Southern culinary historian John Egerton in which he called country ham “an ancient and inimitable treasure, the highest form of the Southern gastronomic art.” The only thing I coveted more than a Smithfield was a ham from Trigg County, Kentucky. I’d even briefly considered buying a Trigg off the Internet. After all, the mail-order turducken had been a big success two years before. But it was obvious that this Smithfield ham and I were destiny.

  “That’s our dinner,” I said to Regina. “Glory be!”

  “Are you sure you want to spend forty dollars?” she said. “It’s awfully big.”

  I looked at her indignantly. “Woman,” I said. “Don’t you understand? I’ve longed to prepare a Smithfield ham my entire adult life.”

  I picked up my ham up and cradled it. The bony back end poked me in the ribs. I bent down and gave it a kiss.

  “I love this ham!” I said.

  “You’re frightening me,” Regina said.

  “Do you see anyone else volunteering to make dinner this year?”

  “No,” she said. “But that’s because…”

  My mother-in-law had just moved into a new house and she couldn’t figure out how to use the stove. My brother and sister in-law, usually reliable cooks, were bunkered down with a new baby. Regina, as was typical for the holidays, had buttoned up her personality tighter than a Salvation Army sergeant’s jacket. The duty fell to me, and just like Mary in the manger, by God, I was going to deliver!

  This cheery thought, along with a soap opera magazine, buoyed me all the way through the interminable checkout line. The grumbling clerk ran my items through the scanner without enthusiasm. I got nervous. Did she think I was a Yuppie? Did she resent my forty-dollar porcine baby? I had to prove that I sympathized with her hard life as a working-class Christian, trapped in an awful job in an ordinary neighborhood in a more or less lame city.

  “Gosh, I got a really big ham!” I said.

  “Uh-huh,” she said.

  “When I saw that Smithfield ham, I just had to have it!”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well,” I said. “Happy Holidays to you!”

  “I hate it when people say Happy Holidays,” she said. “It’s anti-Christian. You say, ‘Merry Christmas.’”

  I looked back at the other people in line. Surely they would mock the provincial attitudes of this foolish woman. No one put up with this kind of crap where I lived. But then I remembered where I was. They all stood there, dour and disapproving. A thin film of menace enveloped the line.

  Here’s what I thought: You people belong to a majority religion in a right-wing theocracy, yet loudmouthed jackasses have somehow persuaded you that you’re some kind of oppressed class! Meanwhile, the government you love is collapsing the economy on purpose. You’re all idiots!

  Here’s what I said: “Heh.”

  Here’s what I should have said: “Yeah? Well, screw you, bitch! This year, Christmas belongs to me! I’m a Jew! And I’m gonna cook a ham!”

  Regina’s father used to make Christmas the stage for his own personal Southern Gothic Christ-figure melodrama. He was a Catholic by birth only and avoided church like Nosferatu. Nevertheless, a few days before the holiday, he’d dramatically proclaim that no one in his family appreciated him and he’d storm out of the house in a fit. Regina says he would check into a hotel, volunteer at a homeless shelter, and then return home on Christmas Eve day with a car full of lavish presents, pretending that nothing had occurred. This happened almost every year, she says.

  In the late eighties, he hit a lode in the risk-management business and began throwing holiday parties at his country club. These parties featured, at one time or another, operettas, vaudeville shows, and Chet Atkins. There were the inevitable ice sculptures, sumptuous dessert buffets to rival anything at the Four Seasons, and thousands upon thousands of dollars’ worth of French wine. Several years before he died, he opened a restaurant, which quickly became the only five-diamond establishment in the state. He invited so many people to his final holiday party, which he held at the restaurant, that the party had to be held over three days. In January 1996, his liver gave out.

  He’d been gone almost two years when I made my first trip to Regina’s family’s house for Christmas, in 1997, but this was the South, so his ghost hovered over the proceedings that year like a supporting character in a mid-era Tennessee Williams play. By then, Regina’s mother had regained control of Christmas. She was a pious Presbyterian, though not born again and not pushy. The only book in the house I could find, other than the Bible and a volume of cat jokes, was Barbara Mandrell’s autobiography. I had more in common with a Bantu elder. The party was over.

  Regina’s dad had bought a player piano during the 1980s, when every mall had a store that sold them. This one operated via hard disks inserted into a panel on the left side, a technology that was outdated then but now seems as distant as the passenger pigeon. Regina claimed that her mother owned a variety of music for the piano, but she could have had The Decline of Western Civilization Part One soundtrack for all I knew. I got to hear only the Christmas disc.

  The piano emitted a tinkly moan, playing a song at about one-third its normal speed.

  “What the hell is that?” I said to Regina.

  “‘Away in a Manger,’” Regina said. “Don’t you recognize it?”

  I didn’t, and I co
uld barely make out “The Little Drummer Boy.” “Silent Night” seemed more familiar, but the player piano’s version sounded like a Twilight Zoneepisode. I imagined a music box turned on its side, playing the same tune over and over again while an old woman shivered in a corner, waiting for death to take her away. Meanwhile, my mother-in-law hummed away cheerfully, dusting the mantel.

  “Regina,” I said. “How can you… stand it?”

  “Because it’s Christmas!” she said.

  The next morning, I came up the stairs to the unbearable racket of a thousand white people backed by an organ. Regina’s mother, apparently, had one CD that she played on Christmas when she got tired of the player piano. I’ve never seen the cover, but if the group doesn’t call itself The Worst Church Choir in the World, they’re lying. The house shook:

  “Noel, Noel, Noel, No-elllllllllllllllllll!”

  I had to get out of there.

  That night, Regina’s brother and sister-in-law came over for dinner. We sat around a big-screen TV and watched a video of Dad playing Santa on his last Christmas. I slumped so deep in my chair that my butt almost touched the floor.

  “There he is!” Regina’s mother said.

  “Aww,” Regina said. “I see him.”

  I reached for the champagne and refilled my glass. Regina’s father had left behind a wine cellar of high quality. Before I’d popped the first appetizer in my mouth, I must have drunk six glasses from six different bottles. That’s about how many drinks it takes, I learned, for a Protestant family to lower its inhibitions. It was a little much for me on an empty stomach.

  I ran for the bathroom and bent over the toilet, making a noise along the lines of: “Bleeeeeeeeeeeech. EEEEEEK! URRRRRGH! AAARRRRR!”