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Having written “The Bass Violin” for this holiday issue, I can’t help staying in the mood for fiction Hanukkah fiction, to boot. You’ve already met the Grossmans; now, in this excerpt from my novel, “This Game We Play,” meet the Axelrods. Merry Christmas, and Shalom! In a household with two Jewish parents, two Jewish sons with high marks at the Temple Beth Israel Sunday School and (I always assumed) a Jewish dog, the celebration of Christmas presented no angst whatsoever to anyone except the person who liked it most. My mother was, with each passing year, more and more of a Christmas junkie. She had no intention of changing course, but she did, at least, feel bad about it. For this reason, our staple Christmas food was a Passover dish even on years when Christmas did not fall during Hanukkah. We didn’t need Hanukkah to justify Passover food on Christmas. Fried matzo, well-washed in Aunt Jemima’s syrup, was a virtue in itself. It wasn’t just Passover food, it was our food, and that, for me and my Christmas-loving Jewish mother, was the beauty of matzo. A family friend who had eaten more than one pork chop at our table came over for holiday brunch one non-Hanukkah Christmas Day and asked why we were having Jewish food on this of all mornings. My mother, who was humming over the frying pan to the second track of “Songs from the Manger,” looked up and said, “Because we’re Jewish.” Once a year for 29 years I have heard my mother sing about a round young virgin while slaving over a hot pan of unleavened bread. When Hanukkah did coincide with Christmas, mom always made it part of her routine to ask dad to scrape the wax off the menorah second thing in the morning, right after we emptied our stockings, and then, while the matzo fried, mom would install that night’s candles in their places and move the menorah to the center of the counter, though the other seven days it was in the corner. Mom always felt a little guilty about the prospect of the menorah being outshone on Christmas day. My big brother Simon once asked mom, “Why do we celebrate Christmas?” and she answered, “Because you never pass up a chance to be happy.” My mother did not rail against the commercialization or secularization of religious holidays, because secularization made the holidays more accessible to all; she would gladly have had an armored Judah Maccabee ride into the houses of little Christian children bearing bags of chocolate gelt. To her, there really was God in the gifts. Even the wise men knew this. Greg Blake Miller writes from Las Vegas. For our Letters department: ocfamily.com |
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