'tis the season

When I was a kid, we had a tree. We decorated the tree and had carp and potato salad around 6PM on Christmas Eve. Then I'd rush to open my gifts: choo-choo trains and cars at first, then later books, books, more books. I remember one Christmas receiving 11 books. There was one about oceanography and one was a kids' encyclopedia and the rest were adventure stories. I read and loved them all. Christmases stopped when I was 12. We are Jewish. The reason we had the tree and the gifts and the dinners in the first place was simple: growing up in marxist Czechoslovakia you could be different at your peril. The regime was strictly atheistic but NOT to celebrate Christmas like all neighbours, friends and foes would have been unthinkable. Just one of the countless paradoxes of the labyrinthine communist nightmare. Anyway, when I was about 12, I believe my parents' original Jewish instincts had finally kicked in, coupled with the fact that there was a political thaw and I was getting older and wiser. I still got books, but no tree.

Many years later, living in Israel, I missed Christmas in Prague: the dusting of snow on the ancient rooftops, carps swimming in big barrels in marketplaces, the smell of pines and (warning, cliche coming up! ) roasting chestnuts. On the other hand, if I so wished, I could actually have attended Midnight Mass in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Many did - this is before the insanity of the intifada. The church was always booked way, way in advanced and packed to the rafters. One could celebrate Christmas in the town where Christmas was born: Beth Lehem (meaning The House of Bread in Hebrew).

And then came my own kids and the Jewish Christmas dilemma reasserted itself. We couldn't entirely skip it and we couldn't entirely celebrate it. Ouch! So the kids got gifts but there was no tree and there was no Santa: instead, I invented a very successful proxy - the Hanukka Clown.

Later yet, I started hating Christmas with a passion...I never felt lonlier and more isolated than on Christmas. Suddenly, without warning, around the age of 40, my Jewish heritage, such as it was, came back to haunt me and simply forbade me to participate in the mirth and the merrymaking. I was fortunate enough to share a few friends who felt exactly the same way and so on Christmas day we could get together and kvetch about the awfulness of it all.

Now - now, I'm sort of indifferent to this holiday. It doesn't thrill me and it doesn't kill me. It doesn't fill me with fear, it doesn't bring much joy - I am not a practicing Jew, yet neither am I a goy. You want to have Christmas and endure the insanity of clogged malls and highways - go ahead! I delight in the fact that my favourite Toronto restaurant "SABABA" is open EVERY SINGLE DAY throughout the holiday.


mmmmmm.....olives......

I don't need to worry about closed supermarkets, oh no, my friends: I will feast on falafel and shwarma and lamb burger and makhtuba and hummus and tahini and baba-ganouj and more and more. And fresh baked pitas on Christmas Day.

I do have a few presents for my wife and I try to put on as jolly a face as I can - just for her. God love her, around Christmas she becomes a kid again and who could begrudge anyone that?
HO HO HO
yours truly
Rudolph