Unmerry Jewish Christmas

Here in Maine we are having a white Christmas. In fact, the white part is the only part of Christmas we are having, and with high winds predicted to cause power outages later today we will have a very dark night, which around here starts at about 4:15 pm.

We have no tree decorated with glittering ornaments. There are no presents, unless you count the ones I bought myself this week. No festive big dinner is planned for relatives from far away all dressed in red plaid vests and Christmas sweaters with reindeer and red ribbons, everyone beaming to be reunited with one another like in those movies on the Hallmark Channel. There are no cakes or cookies or pies or turkeys or hams in the oven releasing yummy smells that waft through the house. You see, we are the Jews who did not die in the Holocaust.

Last night, Christmas Eve I guess you could call it, over lousy food in a nondescript Chinese restaurant -- one of the few places open -- my adult son told me he was depressed because "he grew up without holidays." Never mind the two big seders each year at Passover with special foods like that matzoh ball soup he loved, the lighting of the menorah and opening of gifts for eight consecutive nights each Hanukah, the turkey with all the trimmings and pumpkin and apple pies with whipped cream (fresh of course, never from an aerosol can or that white-trash Cool Whip), shared with friends and family every Thanksgiving, the weeks of making Halloween costumes and then carving pumpkins into jack-o-lanterns and going trick or treating, the fun of decorating eggs at Easter, and the piles of Valentine's Day cards and stuffed animals and boxes of chocolate each February, all to create glowing memories for my one and only adorable child. Just forget all that! We didn't have a Christmas tree, so his memory of childhood is stained with the absence of holiday traditions.

Had I only known that then I could have saved myself a whole lot of trouble, not to mention money. Probably enough to pay for that lobotomy I could really use about now.