Christmas is always stressful for me. I feel guilty. Even when I’m having fun I feel like I’m doing something very bad, going a place I shouldn’t be. Like when I was young and did drugs and said to myself, Well, this will be over in a few hours, and I can go back and be a good boy and everything will be alright again. I just visited; I didn’t live there. But I can’t really make that claim about Christmas because I bathe in it. My wife loves Christmas, every part of it, the ornament, the visiting, the food, the music, but most of all the spirit of it, the carelessness and generosity; and I go along with that. And I’m the only one of my mother’s six children that has a Christmas tree. Even the other intermarried ones have held the line.
My wife gets stressed out in her own way, from too much socializing, and we always have a fight at Christmas. This year the fight was about cooking. We were cooking for her family on Christmas Eve and neither of us is a very good cook, though I try harder. So I got a turkey and had some root vegetables that I threw into the oven, and she was going to make red potatoes and green beans with slivered almonds. Well as it turned out I made everything. She never got around to the red potatoes or the string beans, just a salad, and the vegetables we served were just my afterthought vegetables. My wife is good at getting other people to do stuff she doesn’t want to do, and I stood over the stove feeling manipulated, thinking, well this isn’t even my feast day, it’s her feast day, and I’m slaving over the stove; and now her sister is making the gravy.
We had it out the next morning. She offered her parents eggs for breakfast and I was to cook the, er, bacon and when I was cooking it, she turned to her mother and said, What about if you make the eggs and I’ll put the table together. You cut that deal last night, I said, and I could see my mother in law turn away over the tension, and my wife shot me a dirty look. Then my mother in law got on the phone with her California daughter and my wife and I stood by the Xmas tree and I gave her my now-well-prepared rap about her feast day and she said she had been working the whole time. I worked from 6 yesterday morning, she said; how many critical jobs do you think there are to a dinner party? Is cleaning the house and making it nice an important job? Is entertaining the guests? Life is so sad and unfair, you had one whole job. And you’re a control freak in the kitchen, if you hadn’t made anything, believe me, dinner would have gotten made. I said, You would have had your guests cook. So what? she said. After that I sued for peace and we made up and I served the bacon.
For Christmas dinner we drove to my sister-in-law’s, and on the way there I listened to the radio, and all the shows with Jews talking about Christmas made me feel better about being Christmasy. In one a guy named Michael Feinstein was playing his favorite Christmas music, and talking about the spirit of Christmas, and if he was faking it, well he was a real fake. Then after that several NPR people narrated A Christmas Carol and of course a lot of the NPR people are Jewish. I used to write often at this site that Jewish power demands social exposure; if you are a public person with as much power culturally and politically as so many Jews in the media are, well it is a little unfair to also be telling your children not to marry non-Jews. I reflected that the reason I don’t write about that so much anymore is that it’s archaic. The social tensions in my life are generational; they’re things I had to work out with my parents, and I’m 55, and young people don’t feel twisted up in a knot about these things. They could give a shit; but I’m like an old general, always fighting the last war, missing the new one. I thought about some advice my old friend James North gave me on the phone on Christmas morning. “One piece of advice. Don’t use the word goy or goyim on your site ever again, it’s just old and stupid.”
My sister in law’s was very Christmasy, with traditional foods, roast beef and plum pudding. There was a lot of Christmasy giftgiving in front of the fire. My wife’s family takes the gifts pretty seriously, and it’s a nice ritual I’m always bad at. Nutcrackers and flannel shirts, splitting wedges, birdfeed, a bottle of bitter brought back from Scotland…
My sister in law gave me these fancy next-generation work gloves. They’re stretchy black suede with “carbon leather” patches on the palms and special knuckle guards and are stiff enough to grab rough sharp stuff. I put one on and tightened the Velcro strap and flexed my fingers then held them out. They were tapered and perfect under the rubbery glove and I imagined that my hand was bionic.
It came to me with a shock that there were guys who were doing that right now, looking at their artificial hand. The real one had gotten blown off in Afghanistan or Iraq, and they were trying to adjust. And no one I know or see in this holiday season is even slightly connected to that experience, and still, it’s all around us.
