The Worst Noel by Collected Authors of the Worst Noel

Author:Collected Authors of the Worst Noel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

“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.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.