Month: December 2012

I have very fond memories from the 1990s of listening to a friend’s Gujarati Indian immigrant family butcher Christmas carols. It was an annual Christmas Eve tradition for these religious Hindus.  Each year, with women on one side of the room and men on the other, the genders separated by the large, decorated tree, they joyously worked their way through about a half-dozen classics.  Sometimes they sang in unison, and sometimes they traded parts while they consulted xeroxed lyric sheets.  When it came to “Deck the Halls,” everyone always got a chuckle out of the men warbling “Fa la la la, La la la la!” For me, an 20-something atheist half-Jew, it was a liberating experience. If you have overwrought memories of and expectations for Christmas, it can be quite stressful.  If you’ve become jaded about the holiday’s commercialism and relentlessness, it can be incessantly annoying.  But if you’re Jewish, it can raise issues of inadequacy. Christmas just seems like so much fun.  For starters, there’s the Christmas tree, that coniferous shrine of positive reciprocity, which is certainly one of the coolest things in and of itself in the eyes of a child.  And the litter of gifts it bears?  For a pre-pubescent, the orgy of Christmas gifts is about as close as you get to sex. But it wasn’t just tinsel and ribbons I envied.  The seasonal kindness and fraternity that accompanies Christmas also made me jealous. Goddamn if those Gentiles don’t seem like they’re having the time of their lives during the Christmas season.  All of a sudden everyone is in such a good mood, doing nice things for each other, extending holiday greetings, and sharing moments of real, heart-felt sincerity.  Christians, even relative strangers, have a way of looking in each other’s eyes during the Christmas season and saying just the nicest things in the world and seeming to really, really mean them.