Devil in the Details (16 page)

She was a good teacher. If we asked her a theological question
she couldn’t answer, she responded in philosophical Tevye fashion,
“The sun rises, the sun sets. What are you going to do?”

The sun rises, the sun sets. It was more apt than my mother
realized. This, in a phrase, was our family holiday experience. It
was light and dark, good and bad, Catholic and Jewish, obsessive
and compulsive. There were no matchmakers, no fiddlers, and no
Cossacks, but vodka – there was a little of that.

In December of 1974, the local newspaper ran a picture of my
family trying to stuff a Christmas tree into our Volkswagen Beetle.
There’s my father, a Norman Rockwell figure with furrowed brow,
pipe, and Coke-bottle glasses, struggling mightily with the tree
while my mother and my sister and I, little Chers in ponchos and
pigtails, look on with mild alarm. It was intended as a cute
lifestyle photo, but as far as our family was concerned it was hard
news. It was the first and last time we actually paid for a
tree.

We weren’t cheap so much as lazy. When you wait until December
24, no one’s going to charge you for the crisp, teetering remains.
Sometimes the lot let us have the tree for free. Other times we
were given one by a school or a business already closed for the
holiday. Usually we pulled a prematurely discarded tree off a
neighbor’s trash pile. One year we struck out entirely and had to
decorate a houseplant instead, its tiny pathetic branches bending
with the weight of a few tin ornaments. “A Christmas fern.” My
mother sighed. “It’s the saddest, silliest thing I’ve ever seen in
my life. It’s a Christmas twee.”

I’m not sure why we bothered with a tree at all. Decorating the
tree was always an exercise in dysfunction, the occasion of our
biggest annual family fight. My mother got annoyed because no one
was doing enough to help; my sister and I sulked because my mother
was yelling at us; and my father tried to look busy with some
ancillary activity, mixing eggnog or adjusting the hi-fi to
maximize the sound quality of the holiday sound track. We plowed
through the job sullen and mute, shooting one another hostile looks
as we piled on crocheted snowflakes, glitter-encrusted sugarplums,
garish blinking lights, and a flurry of tinsel icicles. Being a
family that refuses to throw anything away, we had hundreds of
ornaments, half of them bent or broken but all of them still in
play. We kept on decking until the tree was tarted up like a North
Florida stripper. At that point we crowned the sagging mass with a
fraying straw star: ta da, it was done. My mother stepped back to
admire our work, swirling a glass of eggnog nearly brown with
bourbon. “Well, that looks craptacular,” she announced. “Happy
Birthday, J.C.”

It was always a disaster, a fire hazard, an eyesore. Even the
family pets were moved to register their displeasure. The dog peed
on it; the cat ate the needles. A tree doesn’t belong in a house.
More specifically, it didn’t belong in
our
house. It was a
violation of the promise the rabbi had extracted from my parents
when he married them. Ours was to be a Jewish home, with Jewish
kids: no crucifixes, no creches, a mezuzah on every doorpost, giant
Stars of David clanging around all our necks. We would fly an
Israeli flag from the front porch and on Sunday mornings we would
gather, strong and tan from planting trees with our Zionist youth
group, to toast our heritage as herring juice ran down our
chins.

It was my father who broke the bargain and brought home the
first tree when my sister and I were still babies. My mother was
spending Christmas three thousand miles away from the rest of her
family, with a husband who had to work Christmas Day and two
children who were, likely as not, condemned to hell because she
hadn’t been permitted to baptize us. A tree was the least he could
do. From there it all followed: the manger scene, the Advent
calendar, the stuffed Santa, the silver angels, the red and green
wooden block letters my sister always rearranged to spell
S-A-T-A-N. A dinky menorah languished off to the side.

“The best of both worlds,” family friends told us, clucking
approvingly. “What lucky girls you are.” But what did they know?
Their families’ biggest holiday dilemma was whipped or mashed; ours
was only begotten son or false messiah. December is the hardest
time of the year for an interfaith family. Oh sure, it sounds
great: Maccabees and magi! Candles and carols! Festive meals and,
best of all, the presents, double presents, eight days of Hanukkah
plus Christmas, making nine glorious days of greed. But my friends’
good-natured jealousy was sadly misplaced. The extra presents
always turned out to be crap excavated from the bottom of my
mother’s purse, Kleenex packets and breath mints and ballpoint pens
bearing Realtors’ names. It’s hard to sustain the holiday spirit of
magic and miracles when you’re staring down a stocking stuffed with
disposable razors and key chains.

The interfaith feast that followed didn’t make things any
better. Latkes with ranch dressing and spiral-cut ham may be
someone’s idea of a dream dinner, but it sure wasn’t mine.

I might have been a better sport if Hanukkah didn’t get such
short shrift. Hanukkah just can’t compete. It was never supposed
to. A minor holiday that got trumped up because of Christmas, it’s
like a cat in doll clothes, all trussed up in someone else’s party
dress and not very happy about it. But we try. Hanukkah is given
its token treatment. In elementary school the duty fell to me. I
was the only Jewish kid in all six grades. My teachers, flummoxed,
always asked me to deliver the lesson. I dutifully prepared
handouts and gave a presentation each year. It was only as an adult
that I realized how I’d wasted the opportunity. My classmates knew
nothing about Judaism; I could have made everything up. “On
Hanukkah, Jews are given high-ticket gifts by their gentile
friends, who receive nothing in return. On the first night, the
Jews are gifted with hair appliances such as curling irons and
diffusers. The second night, it is traditional to give consumer
electronics, portable stereos and the like. The third night is for
gourmet luxuries like aged steaks. Throughout the whole eight days
it is customary for gentiles to offer Jews the choicest selections
from their lunches and to do the Jews’ homework.”

My classmates would have fallen for it. I was the only Jew any
of them knew, and they tended to over compensate trying to prove
they didn’t hold my faith against me. After we first learned about
the Holocaust, in fourth grade, a classmate approached me, her eyes
wet. “I’m one-eighth German and I feel just awful for what my
people did to your people,” she confessed. “Please accept this gum
as a token of apology.”

Yes, I thought. Bring me your reparations. All of you who’ve
never received a mezuzah for Christmas, who aren’t crossed by
crosses and stars, come before me and present your tribute. Bring
your Juicy Fruit and your fruit roll-ups, your candy canes and your
chocolate coins, all of it, anything to sweeten the taste in my
mouth.

Nine years old and I was already as bitter as the green cherries
dotting the Christmas stollen. By the time I was in high school I’d
cast myself as the Little Match Girl in our domestic holiday drama,
a world-class sulker hosting a pity party of epic proportions. I
was furious that we made so little fuss over Hanukkah and so much
over Christmas, furious that we were marking Christmas at all. I
mourned missing out on the December 25
th
experience
a Jew is supposed to have, eating Chinese food, renting movies, and
making obscene amounts of overtime pay at work. Come Christmas
morning I refused to get excited about even the good gifts,
preferring to spend the day in a holiday snit. Why should I have to
celebrate Christmas? This wasn’t part of the deal, we were supposed
to be raised Jewish, no Christianity in the home, it’s not fair,
this sucks, this
sucks
, and that brand-new Atari is making
it suck only a tiny bit less.

My mother is too well-adjusted for self-pity, but I know those
holidays were no fiesta for her, either. She had to deal with my
fits while quietly suppressing her own. A devout Catholic, she’s
spent the last thirty years celebrating Christmas with three people
who acknowledge the birthday boy only by taking his name in vain.
Watching her trudge off to midnight mass by herself always broke my
heart, though never enough to make me join her, as that would have
meant missing the late-night dating shows I enjoyed so much. But
maybe I should have. She deserves that. She deserves the tree, the
trimmings, all of it. This holiday business isn’t her fault; it
isn’t anybody’s fault. Even if my father hadn’t caved that first
Christmas, the fall was bound to come. Who can resist Christmas?
It’s Christmas! Even my Jewish relatives decorate their homes with
green lights and red bows.

In college I tried to flee it, went to the most Jewish places I
could think of, Jerusalem or Miami, where December 25 was just
another day. No carols, no candy canes – it was what I’d wanted all
my life. But it wasn’t how I’d pictured it at all. I’d imagined
myself watching the sunset on a Tel Aviv beach as my swarthy escort
brought me ouzo after ouzo, forgetting the holiday entirely until I
noticed the date on my
Herald Tribune
.

Instead I found myself looking for the nearest Santa, so
desperate I would have sat in the lap of any fat guy in a red
tracksuit. I missed my family and I missed the festivity. One
Christmas Eve in Israel I was so homesick I went to Bethlehem. But
it wasn’t like home at all. At home I don’t get my inner thighs
patted down by enthusiastic soldiers, and even if I did, it
wouldn’t be the highlight of my day. What a sad, sorry,
inauspicious Christmas that was. The Gulf War was just a few weeks
away, and few pilgrims were bold enough to brave the impending
invasion of Scud missiles and CNN reporters. Manger Square was bare
of any decorations save a lone, tired tinsel garland. The only
visitors were a motley, disoriented, and sedated-looking choir of
Korean Baptists swaying unsteadily on a set of rickety bleachers,
singing off-key carols in heavily accented English, their only
audience a roving band of local children aggressively selling stale
wafer cookies.

There were no magi in Bethlehem that day. But I did leave there
wiser. I resolved that that would be the last holiday season I
would spend away from my family, and it was. From then on I would
embrace it as an opportunity to cherish my family, and my family
would cherish me right back. This probably had less to do with any
profound epiphany than with the fact that by the next Christmas I
was of legal drinking age. We learned that the best way to get into
the holiday spirit is with some holiday spirits. Now my father gets
the day off to a good start by packing our muskets with cocktails
at eleven a.m., and it’s smiles all day. Happy holidays, everybody.
Happy holidays, indeed.

It has always puzzled me that so many cultures have a springtime
interval of ascetism and mourning. Catholics have Lent; Jews have
the Omer; Pentecostals have the end of squirrel-hunting season. It
seems contrary to human nature to mortify the flesh just when it’s
getting warm enough to bare it. But perhaps that’s why these
periods of subdued brooding are necessary. With all the bees
buzzing and blossoms blooming, surely we’d be leaping into orgies
and binges if our faiths didn’t require us to abstain, reflect,
postpone joy.

In our house there was little risk of anyone dying of happiness
in the spring. The interfaith confluence of holidays guaranteed
this was the worst eating we would do all year. We were crippled
not only by Passover’s prohibition on leaven but by Lent’s
prohibition on meat. Also out was whatever staple food my mother
had decided to give up, usually chocolate or ice cream. As bad as
this was, it didn’t approach the unhappiness my cousin caused when
he gave up sarcasm for Lent; he offended his friends for six full
weeks, all of them so used to his tongue-in-cheek comments that
they didn’t realize that by “Nice haircut,” he really meant “Nice
haircut.”

But for the rest of us sarcasm was sustenance, the manna that
got us through the miserable stretch of meals. “
Delicious
dinner’. ‘
Great
omelet. I never would have thought of mixing
in sardines! It’s
fantastic
’. ‘I wish we could eat matzo and
scrod
all year round
.” We were cranky and crampy. Protein
and matzo are constipating enough taken alone, but consumed
together they form a compound that will obstruct the bowel for
weeks on end. I find it no small irony that we celebrate the
Festival of Freedom by eating a food that’s so very binding. Let my
people go, indeed. In our house, the holiday was known as
Gassover.

One year the cat joined us in protest by appropriating the holy
palm my mother had brought home from church. For an entire week he
carried it around in his mouth like a big green Fu Manchu mustache,
his fanged overbite making him look both dippy and pissed off. That
year the parish priest had given a particularly strident speech
about the importance of respecting the palm, and my mother was
appalled. But there was no getting it back. When we tried to
confiscate it, he either found where we’d hidden it or whined until
we produced it. “Do you think that’s bad for him?” my father asked.
“Well, it being a
sin
, yeah, I’d say it’s pretty bad for
him,” my mother replied. “Let’s hope there’s no cat hell.”

Or let’s hope there is; surely that’s the one place there’s no
fish. My least favorite food, it appeared in every course when
seder and Good Friday coincided. The main event was always an old
Lenten family recipe called ‘Fancy Fish,” which consisted of sole
dredged in mayonnaise and topped with bread crumbs, here replaced
by matzo meal. Bad as it was, at least it knew its place; at least
it didn’t try to be a dessert. Gefilte fish does. Gefilte fish is
the Spam of the Jewish people. It is our national culinary
disgrace. We eat it because it never occurs to us that we don’t
have to. It tastes like cat food, but even our cat wouldn’t eat it.
It is a nugget of carp-flavored cement, a clot of ashen misery. It
is the color of despair, almost funerary, musty and sweet. Sweeter
still was our seder wine, a screw-top kosher affair that promised
notes of Marshmallow Fluff. “The label says it’s ‘cream finish’’ my
father would say with a smile, filling our glasses. “I think we’re
in for a treat.”