imaginary holidays
I guess Jewish Christmas has been a thing forever but now people call it Jewish Christmas, right? Like it's more solidly thingified. It used to just be you were bored and hungry and Jewish and nothing was open except Chinese restaurants and movie theaters.
~10 years ago, when I was ovo-lacto-fried-chicko postvegetarian, I was edging toward eating red meat again because once you're eating birds and fish it's sort of shruggy why you'd not eat other animals unless it's for health, which it wasn't (I was 30 and in ok shape) and I had just kind of lost any attachment to my reasons for not eating stuff. Boris, my bf at the time, was excited to have a carnivore partner-in-restaurant-eating so on that holiday in spring when a guy supposedly came back from the dead, we went for hamburgers and thus was Beefster born at a humble cheeseburgery on 9th Avenue.
I still try to have a hamburger on Beefster, but if you have too many imaginary holidays, people maybe start to think you're nuts, and Beefster has faded a little now that I have Partonnukah, more fully Syncretic Dolly Partonnukah, a festival of lights commemorating the time the spirit of Dolly bestowed upon us a street corner used turntable and an excellent Smithsonian 10 LP set of country music dating back to whenever for a dollar at the junk store. Traditionally you light hannukah candles some nights (including the forth night on which the prayer of course as you light each one is "Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene") and other nights if you don't feel like it, you light tea lights in the glass candle holders that looks suspiciously like ample bosoms. I am fond of Partonnukah. It has regional variants such as Mow the Lawnukkah, I hear.
I think now, though, Jewish Christmas has taken an official place as my favorite holiday. The reason for this is that New Year's was my lifelong favorite holiday and every year people said "oh New Year's is always so disappointing" and every year I said "sure is!" but secretly still loved it, and then we moved far away from most of our friends, to a place where our few friends were mostly early-to-bed sorts, and New Years became indeed a sad little nothing, or some spell was broken and I saw it for what everyone had been insisting it was. Giving it up is like saying goodbye to a friend, or perhaps even abandoning a friend, but I just can't fake it anymore I don't think.
Jewish Christmas, on the other hand, still feels festive. The Chinese restaurants are filled with other yids and the religiously unaligned who think Jewish Christmas is fun. The movies are mobbed because people are done with regular Christmas anyway. They always release dumb shit that is often enjoyable dumb shit. The paradigmatic Jewish Christmas movie of recent years, I would say, was, oh, that thing with Cher and Christina Aguilera. Burlesque? I don't even remember. It was sweet and stupid and fun.
I will miss the good old New Yearses. One year there was my first Winter Musicale (the party in Austin where everyone plays or sings and the musical selections get more surreal and ridiculous as the night goes on) and two or three in Philadelphia with WB's friends on the rooftop with champagne at midnight and of course the childhood ones with my cousin who I had a complicated relationship with for most of thirty years and who I no longer talk to. Farewell certain years, as the saying goes.
But I think I have enough happy Jewish Christmases now to form a bank of nostalgia. The most fun ones (including Burlesque) were with my work wife Jen in NYC, who also loves good ol' JC. Those were at Grand Szechuan in Chelsea, which was simply bursting with Jews. We'd have the crispy fried tofu, which ought to be the Christmas ham of Jewish Christmas. I think I have childhood JC memories, though, going to Chinese restaurants in Dallas that probably we'd find a little gross these days (but look, we weren't urban sophisticates. I still like oversweet Americanized Chinese food as its own thing.)
It's just rainy and chilly here, so it doesn't have that kind of physical memory of what any holiday is like, but I'm enjoying a last few days off before starting a new job, and the cats are happy about it, and....I dunno. It's fine. It's nice. General Tso bless us, every one!
~10 years ago, when I was ovo-lacto-fried-chicko postvegetarian, I was edging toward eating red meat again because once you're eating birds and fish it's sort of shruggy why you'd not eat other animals unless it's for health, which it wasn't (I was 30 and in ok shape) and I had just kind of lost any attachment to my reasons for not eating stuff. Boris, my bf at the time, was excited to have a carnivore partner-in-restaurant-eating so on that holiday in spring when a guy supposedly came back from the dead, we went for hamburgers and thus was Beefster born at a humble cheeseburgery on 9th Avenue.
I still try to have a hamburger on Beefster, but if you have too many imaginary holidays, people maybe start to think you're nuts, and Beefster has faded a little now that I have Partonnukah, more fully Syncretic Dolly Partonnukah, a festival of lights commemorating the time the spirit of Dolly bestowed upon us a street corner used turntable and an excellent Smithsonian 10 LP set of country music dating back to whenever for a dollar at the junk store. Traditionally you light hannukah candles some nights (including the forth night on which the prayer of course as you light each one is "Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene") and other nights if you don't feel like it, you light tea lights in the glass candle holders that looks suspiciously like ample bosoms. I am fond of Partonnukah. It has regional variants such as Mow the Lawnukkah, I hear.
I think now, though, Jewish Christmas has taken an official place as my favorite holiday. The reason for this is that New Year's was my lifelong favorite holiday and every year people said "oh New Year's is always so disappointing" and every year I said "sure is!" but secretly still loved it, and then we moved far away from most of our friends, to a place where our few friends were mostly early-to-bed sorts, and New Years became indeed a sad little nothing, or some spell was broken and I saw it for what everyone had been insisting it was. Giving it up is like saying goodbye to a friend, or perhaps even abandoning a friend, but I just can't fake it anymore I don't think.
Jewish Christmas, on the other hand, still feels festive. The Chinese restaurants are filled with other yids and the religiously unaligned who think Jewish Christmas is fun. The movies are mobbed because people are done with regular Christmas anyway. They always release dumb shit that is often enjoyable dumb shit. The paradigmatic Jewish Christmas movie of recent years, I would say, was, oh, that thing with Cher and Christina Aguilera. Burlesque? I don't even remember. It was sweet and stupid and fun.
I will miss the good old New Yearses. One year there was my first Winter Musicale (the party in Austin where everyone plays or sings and the musical selections get more surreal and ridiculous as the night goes on) and two or three in Philadelphia with WB's friends on the rooftop with champagne at midnight and of course the childhood ones with my cousin who I had a complicated relationship with for most of thirty years and who I no longer talk to. Farewell certain years, as the saying goes.
But I think I have enough happy Jewish Christmases now to form a bank of nostalgia. The most fun ones (including Burlesque) were with my work wife Jen in NYC, who also loves good ol' JC. Those were at Grand Szechuan in Chelsea, which was simply bursting with Jews. We'd have the crispy fried tofu, which ought to be the Christmas ham of Jewish Christmas. I think I have childhood JC memories, though, going to Chinese restaurants in Dallas that probably we'd find a little gross these days (but look, we weren't urban sophisticates. I still like oversweet Americanized Chinese food as its own thing.)
It's just rainy and chilly here, so it doesn't have that kind of physical memory of what any holiday is like, but I'm enjoying a last few days off before starting a new job, and the cats are happy about it, and....I dunno. It's fine. It's nice. General Tso bless us, every one!