Cranukah 2012

So many years Chanukah and Christmas do not overlap, but this year in 2012 they do. The 6th night of Chanukah falls on Christmas day and I love it when they merge.
What better way to celebrate everything Christmas and Chanukah is supposed to be about then with a day of Cranukah?!

After all, Jesus was Jewish.

Chanukah or shall I say Hanukkah, (both correct I believe) is the festival of lights, the eight-day holiday commemorating the rededication of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem,
is a time of celebration. It is a time of family and gift giving, good-deed giving, love and kindness and a good excuse to eat lots and lots of Latkes. Delicious although I have come to understand slightly constipating. Do chase with a lot of applesauce and a prune.

Christmas, the holiday celebrating the birth of Christ is also a time of celebration of family, of love, of kind-ness, of gift-giving of good-deed giving and really honeys Christmas in New York City is the only time of year when New Yorkers really will slow down long enough to smell the roses, well hmmm at least the pine-needles of all those Christmas trees for sale on every other block!

And yes, it would be nice if the Christmas season could be a tad less commercial and a whole lot more about good-ness but ya know at least most folks get the holiday spirit.

Growing up I always felt left out of Christmas. Most of the folks in my home towns (we moved a lot) were having grand Christmas eve parties and waking up to a bounty of gifts on Christmas day, then celebrating all day long. All the movies and the Charlie Brown cartoons were dedicated to Christmas too.

There we were, eights days of sitting around the dinette set while my mother handed us gifts, 3 out of five were socks,generic shampoo and school note-pads, really my dears the kinds of things parents are supposed to give their kids anyway, not make gifts out of. Then owing to the Grants-going-out-of-business sale, we’d get the dolls. Oh they might have a broken arm or an ink mark on their cheek, but they’d been purchased for pennies on the dollar.

“They’re almost as good as new as you get three dolls instead of one for the same price!” Mom would shriek delighted.

I would think of my school pals opening up packages including brand-new, full priced top-of-the-line dolls, everything on their Santa wish list, while they drank hot apple cider or egg nog and ate warm cinnamon buns. We were drinking diet-right cola in paper cups and eating stale matzo with peanut butter on it. NOT FAIR, NOT FAIR!

One year I wrote a Santa Wish list too. I only put one thing on it. GET ME OUT OF HERE!

After I moved out (escaped) I had Christian girlfriends and room-mates and sometimes Christmas trees in the apartments I lived in. One year, in my 6th-floor-walk-up pre-war apartment in the west village, my roommate Terry spun gold tinsel around the small Christmas tree in the living room. When we shut out the lights, it twinkled and blinked in glory and was a beauty to behold! But it didn’t feel right to me. I kept thinking a bolt of lighting would come thru the window and strike me down, not from g-d, no g-d is a loving merciful being who loves people of all religions equally, I hope. No the bolt of lighting would come from a far more frightening being…..my mother.

The next morning the gold tinsel was gone! We looked everywhere and it was nowhere to be found. Terry was bewildered. I was terrified! Had Harriet (my mom) broken in and stolen the tinsel? Would I find tiny star-of-David’s sprinkled on the linoleum?!

A few hours later the mystery was solved. JD, the black longhaired cat I’d rescued from the ASPCA a year earlier, let out a cry as he came darting away from the litter box. As he ran across the living room, I noticed a foot of gold tinsel trailing out of his ass.

I called the vet. “Don’t pull it whatever you do! Just keep snipping it off with scissors. It will work it’s way out!” the vet replied. “Whatever you do, just don’t pull!”

Many cuttings, and one horrified cat later, the tinsel was fully pooped. JD avoided the tree ever after and I never looked at tinsel quite the same way again.

These days I am tree-less and cat-less, JD and my tabby Lu Lu are in kitty heaven, where they can eat all the tuna coated tinsel they want poop free.

This Christmas I am sitting in front of the fire with my sweetie, an Italian Catholic beauty from Bensonhurst. We are listening to Christmas music on the classical station and eating oatmeal. I am willing to get her a tree if she so chooses especially now, that they will probably be half-off or perhaps even free. I am my mother’s daughter after all. But mostly, I think right here and now, looking at the menorah on the fireplace mantel, listening to the violins of the gorgeous Christmas classics on the radio and watching this kind lovely woman stare at the fire in delight that the holiday season whatever you believe in, is really just about love. However you slice it, dice it or splice it. I’m fairly sure Harriet who is now in Jewish mama heaven where you can buy anything, anytime, 50% off, doesn’t care whether or not I have a tree anymore, only that I’m happy.

Mom, I’m working on it, but I’m Jewish after all and we have to have something to complain about. Kvetching is how we breathe, but yeah aside from a strained back, a slight sore-throat, a mild head-ache, a few friends who don’t appreciate me and a fear of Al Pacino’s hair, I’m happy mom, I really am.

Here’s hoping, you all find joy on this day, Merry Cranukah to all and to all a good night.