How to Spell Chanukah...And Other Holiday Dilemmas (18 page)

BEN SCHRANK

Presents!

T
HE YEAR
I
WAS NINE, MY FATHER AND
I
DID THE FIRST NIGHT OF
C
HANUKAH AT THE
S
TEINS' HOUSE ON THE
U
PPER
W
EST
S
IDE.
M
ELISSA
S
TEIN WAS ELEVEN AND ABOUT TWENTY POUNDS HEAVIER THAN ME.
A
FTER DINNER AND BEFORE PRESENTS, WE WENT TO HER BEDROOM AND PLAYED A GAME ON HER BED CALLED
D
RIVE THE
C
AR. I GOT UP ON TOP OF HER AND WORKED
the stick shift, which I think was her elbow, and pushed the pedals, which were her knees. The car, which was her, got going faster and faster, and then there was the accident once we really had some speed going, where the car suddenly turned all wobbly and then everything broke and the car lay flat and whirring. I fell on top of the smashed car and there we were, hugging or whatever, fucking around without being able to take it anywhere, since we were children. I remember liking the game and hoping that I might play it with girls from school who I liked better than Melissa Stein, who was just my dad's friend from college's kid who went to private school and was kind of snobby when she wasn't letting me climb all over her.

Then we got called into the living room for flourless chocolate cake and the first Chanukah present. I got a record player from my dad and he said, That's it. That's all you get. I said, What about the next seven gifts? And he was like, You got the eight gifts right here: there's a speaker, and another speaker, and the turntable, and the needle, and the volume control, and the on and off switch, et cetera. The Steins laughed and laughed. So that's what Chanukah is for me: scrambling around, trying to get my fair share of presents and sex.

G
ROWING UP,
I
didn't have crushes on Jewish girls, because after my parents got divorced my dad didn't really go for the Jewish ladies. Now I'm married to a Quaker. We have a menorah somewhere, I don't know where, but I'm going to have to fight to use it with our kids, assuming we have some, which is another thing I'm praying about. My wife is a lot younger than I am, and in my weak moments I suspect she'll leave me for some more upbeat guy, some robust Christian with a lot of earning power who doesn't spend Friday nights brooding about how he has no friends but instead takes time to plan fun adventures where they pack a picnic lunch and go climb a little mountain and make sure to take their garbage with them, their napkins and plastic wrap and knives for the pâté and whatever, when they climb back down. Actually, I'd like to marry that guy, too. And during the hike if I bring up Chanukah and my marginally Jewish upbringing, which was fueled mostly by loneliness and despair and arrogance, he can tell me to shut up and tie my hiking boots tighter and maybe move a little quicker too, huh? Because life is about more than just wanting presents and we're trying to make it up this mountain and back down before the sun sets and we all catch colds. And what about giving back to the group, anyway? He'd want to know about that and I'd have to admit that no, I'm still trying to learn about the power of giving.

M
Y MOM CARED
even less for organized religion than my dad did. She gave me her copy of
The Wanderers
by Richard Price for Chanukah, because she felt bad that my dad had played a joke on me with that record player. I remember not bothering with that book until the summer, when I read it one afternoon on a swing at someone's country house on Long Island. We never had a country house—not that we couldn't have afforded one, we totally could have, but since my parents were divorced neither of them could be bothered. So most times that are naturally happy for people, vacation times, were shit for me, since I was alone reading. Too bad for my wife, huh? Anyway, my mom gave me
The Wanderers,
a book that mattered to me in a different way than better stuff, like the requisite group of books by Philip Roth that every boy should read. But
The Wanderers
was a book that I read before I understood what it was about, so when one character asks “Do you have any bags?” when they're about to have sex with a girl at their friend's house, I thought they meant brown paper bags, so they could come in the bags. Yep, didn't realize till a lot later that they meant condoms. I guess I looked forward to next Chanukah, when I'd hop off Melissa Stein and dash around her bedroom, desperately looking for a brown paper bag before I made a mess.

Around that same time, I read
Ladies' Man
by Richard Price, which I snagged from my mom at my grandparents' house one holiday season back when Chanukah came at the same time as Christmas, so this must've been around 1980. That's the most depressing book in the whole world, where the main character is losing his girlfriend, who he calls La Di, and it's the seventies, and everybody in New York wants to just die because they're singing the same song La Di sings at her audition, which just ruins everything. That song was—you guessed it—“Feelings.”

I
DID USE
that record player, and I appreciated it. I just wish my father hadn't played a joke on me. Or maybe it would've been better if I was less spoiled? I remember going out to dinner with my dad and a friend of his to an Indian restaurant. They ordered and then the waitress looked at me and smiled and I said, I'll have the grand taster's platter for two! My dad just shook his head and said, Like hell you will. But I was going to share it, I said. I don't think you know how to share yet, my father said. And he was right. So I got the chicken tandoori and brooded. I knew I was spoiled and had an attitude problem, but I was an only child and couldn't help myself.

I bought Who records to play on that record player and, specifically,
Tommy,
a record that I bought with Chanukah gelt and played exactly once. I got terribly freaked out when Tommy gets his balls fondled while he plays a mean pinball and I wrapped the record back up in its plastic and got my babysitter, this lesbian named Seal who worked in a plant shop called the Enchanted Garden and who used to deal pot to her friends in front of me, to take me down to Sound Track on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn, to return it. I bought
Led Zeppelin III
instead. I didn't understand that record at all, either. But I liked playing with the pinwheel. Yeah, that was the end of the seventies in Brooklyn, and Chanukah didn't mean much to me since I was such an avaricious kid, but classic rock and sex were huge presences that barely left room for anything else. That's how I began to process Chanukah: it was the time when you get some presents and a very special gypped feeling that you're a Jew and always will be and you'll never get to join in the reindeer games, especially if you're an only child who doesn't know how to share with others.

M
Y
G
RANDMOTHER
B
EA
is ninety-one and my Aunt Dee is sixty-something and my wife and I were hanging out one Sunday recently at about five in the afternoon in West Orange, New Jersey, at my grandmother's condominium. We'd finished up our portions of egg salad and tuna fish on challah bread and we were just talking. Maybe we were eating some orange slices and Hershey's Kisses and listening to the air conditioner. Maybe we finished up with some of those individually wrapped coffee-nips candies. So I was like, Chanukah, right? And Dee was like, Oh yeah, that's bullshit if there ever was bullshit. Though of course she didn't curse like that. But she was like, Kwanzaa for the Jews, no doubt! In 1955 we weren't getting eight presents! Nuh-uh. Rather, it was yet another incidental holiday that didn't hold a candle to the high ones or even Pesach, yeah, the holidays that matter to the real Jews. And I noted how I grew up twisted on the pyre of this cultural goof of a holiday, this holiday that had me totally feeding into my materialistic side. And my grandmother and my aunt and my wife said, Well, that's not our problem that you're an asshole like that.

M
Y WIFE AND
I
are going to butt heads for sure about having the tree in the house when we have kids, and we'll most definitely be doing her family traditions because they actually make her happy, like the gingerbread house made out of graham crackers at Christmas (the graham crackers are the gingerbread-house equivalent of drywall) and she'll put them in a nonreligious context. Thank G–d. Because she's ambivalent or atheistic or both on G–d, but deeply committed to the concept of tradition. Because she believes tradition makes people happy! And now, finally, I understand that she's right. It's good to have somewhere to go and some other folks to be with during a time when you can't go to work and be yourself and you also can't lie on your side and just read a book, and it's especially nice to have something to do when you get there, like open presents!

I'm starting to like tradition. One of the great things about becoming an adult is that I understand what's great about being a Jew. But I can't stop with the presents. I love presents, and if we could just get some kids going I'm sure I'd like to give them some presents almost as much I'd like to get more presents for me. There's so much stuff I'm going to get as soon as I have more money, like a pair of Gallo Reference 1 loudspeakers, a McIntosh preamp and amp, one of those fiftieth-anniversary Eames chairs (I really do not care that it's a cliché. Those things can put you to sleep faster than Xanax) and some of those New Balance 992s in black and maybe a houndstooth suit from Paul Stuart and some Crockett & Jones suede shoes and an IWC Mark XII watch. Yeah, that's some stuff I want for Chanukah, along with a car, but not a German car. Nope, do not take me there. I'll probably have kids, and that will keep me from being able to afford all that stuff. But that'll be okay, because it'll be nice to get the kids some things. And maybe we'll have a menorah we can set up on a counter in the kitchen or something, so they'll remember that Dad is Jewish, after all, and a little part of them is, too.

KAREN E. BENDER AND ROBERT ANTHONY SIEGEL

The Light, the Sword,
and the Nintendo DS

T
HE
M
ACCABEES DIDN'T STAND A CHANCE AGAINST THE CATALOGS THAT BEGAN TO APPEAR IN MID-
N
OVEMBER. OUR CHILDREN,
J
ONAH AND
M
AIA, BEGAN TO LOOK THROUGH THEM AS A HOBBY.
T
HEY EACH SETTLED ON ONE EXPENSIVE PRESENT THAT WOULD LINK THEIR LONGING WITH THAT OF A GAZILLION OTHER CHILDREN,
J
EWISH AND
C
HRISTIAN, A
terrifying and determined mob, plotting their conquests around the globe. We dreaded the arrival of the catalogs each afternoon. The children could spot them sticking out of our mailbox like eagles spotting a mouse from a great height. They were their Torahs, their holy books.

“I get to see it first!” Jonah, who was six, screamed.

“No, me!” Maia, who was two, shrieked.

Jonah could read his electronics catalog by himself, and did so with a strange sort of tenderness, as if learning for the first time of the world's bounty. “Good news, Dad,” he said, when we went to tuck him in for the night. “Nintendo DS comes with a game bundle, and it's only a hundred and forty-nine dollars!” He seemed genuinely glad—not for himself only but for us, that this miracle was possible.

Maia still needed a little help, however. She would sit cross-legged on the floor with her
American Girl
catalog on her lap and say, “Read!” with that threatening look on her face that presaged an explosion. We would spend what seemed to be interminable, eerie hours reading aloud the text accompanying pictures of scarily vapid, saccharine dolls in period costumes, until we could simply recite the words by heart. Maia would caress the pictures as we spoke, staring with longing as if recalling a long-lost love. Over time, we noticed that there was one picture in particular to which she kept returning: Marisol, a girl in a purple tutu. “Is Marisol the one you want?” we asked.

Maia nodded shyly.

“Then you will get Marisol.”

Maia jumped up and began doing a genuine dance of joy, waving her hands over her head and swaying, her delicate face radiant with pleasure. The price tag: only $87 with a jazzy girl outfit; $26 more for the tutu.

This wasn't exactly what we had intended. When we'd had our children, we'd wanted to improve upon our own experience, to give them the holiday experience that we now wished we had had. While we had, as a young married couple, celebrated Chanukah carelessly, whenever we saw fit, we now wanted to know exactly when Chanukah fell; we wanted to know what the letters on the dreidel meant. Suddenly, as parents, we were the ones who could construct the world that would help our children create their own memories.

Plus, while we had been raised in the cities of Los Angeles and New York, among two of the most concentrated Jewish populations on the globe, our children were being raised in Wilmington, North Carolina, where our son was the only Jewish child in his entire elementary school. During the month of December, houses everywhere became artistic tributes to various forms of Santa; our next-door neighbor had designed a Santa out of potato sacks, plopped him on top of a tractor, and parked this odd creation in front of his house. Our house was the only one on the block that was dark.

We had bought our first menorah at a sale by the Ladies Concordia Society at the Temple of Israel, the Reform temple that we had joined soon after arriving in Wilmington. We had been surprised by the variety of items and tchotchkes on sale. There were menorahs with ceramic sports figures, with Disney characters, and a military one featuring metal replicas of tanks. There were Chanukah doodads of astounding variety: bags of gelt, but also a bag of jelly beans called “Maccabeans,” a yo-yo with a menorah on it that played “I Have a Little Dreidel” when you tossed it, electric dreidels that bounced, kits where you could roll your own beeswax candles, Chanukah finger puppets, coloring books, and so on. We loaded up. We would create our own version of Chanukah for our children. But what would it be?

Our Chanukah would focus not on the presents, which we'd learned was a recent innovation to compete against Christmas, but instead on the story that the holiday was meant to celebrate: the victory of the Maccabees against King Antiochus, who tried to suppress the Jewish religion, and the miracle of the Temple light.

Needless to say, the children had never really cooperated in that venture. It didn't help matters that Chanukah is a relatively minor holiday in the Jewish tradition. Yes, a successful revolt, men with spears, a guy named “The Hammer,” but what it all comes down to is
oil that lasts longer than expected
. Ultimately, that is a tough sell to two children in a small southern city temporarily inundated with images of wise men with camels, drummer boys, talking animals in a manger, a fat man in a red suit who hands out gifts for free, and something they can really identify with: a baby his parents think is God.

Jonah was two when he began to notice the Christmas frenzy going on around him and started throwing tantrums in front of department store windows, having breakdowns at friends' houses when he saw all the new toys they had scored, and asking confused questions about Santa Claus and where this incredible bounty of bleeping, whirring, flashing goodies came from.

Rather than being an expression of our Jewish identity, Chanukah very quickly became the thing that would protect us from the evils of Christmas. To an extent it worked: we didn't have to haul him out of the mall kicking and screaming—or not all the time, anyway—and we didn't have to worry about him converting to Christianity each December. Every time he saw one of those Santa shows on TV—the kind that seem to function as infomercials for some hidden cabal of toy manufacturers—we could just say, “Forget about Christmas. You get Chanukah, you lucky dog, and it lasts for eight days instead of just one! Tell that to your little gentile friends!”

Of course, this did not really address the greed problem. If anything, it made it worse; we were essentially signaling to our children that they would find a better rate of return in being Jewish than Christian. So while we were disturbed and frightened by the greed we had unleashed, we were nevertheless captive to it, and telling them once again about the Maccabees was beginning to feel futile. “So you see,” we said, “the greatest miracle of them all was the decision to light the lamp, not knowing whether the oil would last—the miracle of hope.”

“Can I get the enhanced game bundle?” asked Jonah.

“And I want tutu!” said Maia.

“Don't you understand?” we asked. “If Judah Maccabee hadn't beaten the Romans, we would be praying to Zeus right now.”

Jonah thought about this. “Does he give toys too?”

T
HIS TIME, WE
told the children that they would get all their presents on the first night, after dinner and the lighting of the candles. The idea was that taking care of the gift giving right away would leave the rest of the holiday free of greed. After some arguing it was decided that the schedule could be moved up—we would open presents before dinner, though after the candles . . . well, before the candles. . . . It was midafternoon and still light out when they began ripping furiously at the wrapping. It was like watching piranhas feed. We stood by stunned and a little frightened, waiting for the joy that would be our reward.

We moved closer to Maia as she began to unwrap the American Girl doll that she had pointed to in the catalog again and again. Marisol. We had ordered Marisol on December 1, as supplies were limited, and the customer service agent had said that Marisol was on back order but was guaranteed to arrive by December 25, which was now happily the first night of Chanukah.

“Maia, here's Marisol,” we said. She lifted Marisol out of the box and placed her on her lap.

There was silence.

“I hate her,” said Maia.

“What?” we asked, realizing, with horror, that she was not wearing the tutu she had worn in the catalog.

“Not right doll!” shrieked Maia and threw the doll across the room.

It did not go well with the Princess Alexa carriage, either, which we opened and found in many pieces, with instructions so complex they might as well have been for a spacecraft. Maia stood by the disassembled pieces and wailed, “Where my carriage?”

Jonah tore open the Nintendo he had been pleading for, which we had once caught him murmuring about in his dreams (“comes with Mario for one forty-nine”). He had never seen the thing before, but he was caught in a kind of trance as he instantly found the on button, pushed it, and began playing, as though simply resuming a game that had been interrupted in some past life. “Jonah, do you like it?” we asked him. He stared at the screen, mouth open. We watched, forgotten.

We sat, disappointed by the children's reactions. Or maybe “disappointed” was not the word—we'd been cheated. We had hoped that our generosity would make our children turn to us with renewed love and faith in the world's goodness. Instead, they'd had the bad manners to either protest or ignore us. What was this? What had happened to the joy of Chanukah?

As with any riot, the roots of our Chanukah conflagration lay in the past—or should we say in Chanukahs past? We adults had each had different experiences with the holiday.

Karen:

In my family, the Chanukah presents were given on one night, with much fanfare. The menorah was lit, the prayer said, but the latkes were always frozen, no one really knew how to play with a dreidel, and nobody retold the story of the Maccabees or the Temple light. The presents from the chorus of relatives were arranged on the fireplace, in towers organized by name.

My sisters and I were urged, or perhaps required, to make presents for the relatives, not buy them. It was a large group, not all particularly deserving of a homemade present, but there they were. Chanukah was associated with a factory in the bedroom, glue, glitter, overuse of the word
love,
spelling of
Chanukah
on homemade cards in various ways, made-up piano compositions that I had to play for everyone, individualized tributes to aunts, uncles, grandparents. It was exhausting. It was not always sincere. Once I rebelled and bought a package of pink soaps shaped like roses at a drugstore for my mother; it was a huge relief. Regular consumers seemed distant, glamorous figures who could go into a store, plunk down some money, and, with that simple action, be absolved.

When I grew up, Chanukah became absorbed into the current of blind festivity that was December. It was a chance for me to unload dozens of homemade mini–pumpkin breads onto friends and relatives, having moved from homemade cards to baked goods; it was a chance to visit relatives; but I frequently did not know what days Chanukah actually fell on.

Robert:

In contrast, my childhood Chanukahs were marked by near-Dionysian excess, and the sort of heavy-laden, self-disgusted feeling that I would know later in life on New Year's morning, stumbling home at early dawn. My parents would hide presents every night and we would scurry around the apartment to find them, and when we did, we would tear at the wrappers like madmen. We spent no time playing with these toys, however, because we were too busy fighting about who'd gotten the better present, or wondering what the next night's haul would bring, or badgering our parents to reveal what was coming, or, once that had finally been revealed, angling for something even better. The atmosphere in the house was feverish, hallucinatory. But the strangest thing was that it didn't just happen by accident: no, our parents actually
liked
orchestrating this frenzy. One Chanukah, we hit the eight-day mark, ran out of candleholders on the menorah, and were all so reluctant to come down off the love binge that we just kept going: the pattern of hiding, finding, and complaining repeated each night for twenty-two nights, till we were burnt out and nerve-dead, our rooms piled with toys we had absolutely no interest in.

As an adult, living on my own, I found that the holiday brought up vaguely troubling associations, and I ignored it. The truth was that I knew only Greedikah, not Chanukah, and I wasn't greedy for
things
anymore.

T
HE SIGHT OF
Maia throwing Marisol across a room littered with shredded wrapping paper and other very expensive toys in various states of disassemblage and nonappreciation was shocking enough to lead us to a resolution: we were tired of celebrating Greedikah. The kids would have to learn the true meaning of Chanukah, even if it killed us (or them). And so we threw ourselves into Chanukah as a project. Each night, we had a different activity. We made latkes by hand, grating the potatoes, throwing them into the bubbling oil. We went to a friend's big Chanukah party—with fifty people, perhaps the largest Chanukah party in the city.

We tried to tell them the story. “How would you feel,” we asked Jonah at breakfast the next morning, “if someone said you couldn't play soccer?” He was wide-eyed; we could see that we were reaching him. We tried to think of his version of a holy book. “How would you feel if someone said you couldn't read
Captain Underpants
?”

He nodded gravely. “I'd feel really bad if someone said I couldn't have my Nintendo.”

Was this it? Was it close? “Well, yeah, that's it. That's sort of how the Maccabees felt, sort of.”

What was the Chanukah story, exactly? We read the children's versions we had bought for them. It had everything, frankly, that children would like. Unfair rules. Rebellion. Battles. Magical fire.

We played up the battle part.

“Then Judah the Maccabee spurred the Jews to take back the Temple!”