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Oy Vey . . . It’s Christmas
By Julie Stankowski
Oy Vey. Oh holy Jesus. Chanukah. Christmas. Gelt. Yule logs. Menorahs. Nativity scenes. Dreidels. Santa Claus. Potato latkes. Ham.
Christmakah or Chanuchristmas or however you want to say it, is an animal unto itself if you happened to have married someone of a different faith. For a Jewish girl (that would be me), the holiday season starts with Thanksgiving and ends with New Year’s with eight days of Chanukah in between. Chanukah means taking out a few special menorahs, buying Chanukah candles, wrapping eight presents and making potato latkes (not so hard, you can use frozen shredded potatoes!). For a Christian boy (that would be my husband), the holiday season begins and ends the same way, but it is the in between time, when I am doing Chanukah and he is doing Christmas, that always makes me feel the major cultural difference between Jews and Christians (forgive me for my shallow take on interfaith marriage boiling down to Chanukah and Christmas. I am simply too ignorant about religion to discuss anything more substantive).
So, each year during Christmakah, my husband and I fight. You want to know what we fight about? Let me tell you. First, half of my three-car garage is unusable all year long because it is packed with Christmas storage boxes. I have never in my life seen someone with so much stuff! Anyway, the day after Thanksgiving, my dear husband pulls my car out of the garage (the only car that can fit in the overstuffed garage) so that he can begin what I have now come to know as the long, long journey into decorating the house for the holidays. He needs room to pull down all of his boxes and view what he has accumulated over the last 40 years (I don’t think he has gotten rid of one Christmas decoration since Kennedy was president!). He then decides which of the 500 boxes will come into the house and subsequently sit in the house for weeks while he decorates after work and on the weekends.
In between the decorating, he must shop. And shop. And shop. I think every clerk at Target, Toys R Us, Nordstrom, Costco and Macy’s is on a first name basis with my husband. He has (sorry, Honey) an illness. Is there an organization known as Christmas Shoppers’ Anonymous? I could just see my husband, “Hi, I am Jim and I am a Christmas Shopoholic.” I hope this article does not cause a divorce, but seriously, I do not think there is one toy or gadget currently on the market that is not in my house waiting to be wrapped for one of my children. It is the most serious case of gluttony I have ever witnessed. This is the case year after year after year. I mean how many children get so much that they can’t even open all of their presents and half of those hard-to-find toys end up sitting in my already overflowing garage until the following holiday season when I donate them to the cute firemen to give to Toys for Tots (okay, one benefit for me). So, once I think there are no more possible presents my husband can buy, he asks me to go shopping with him and tells me we hardly have anything for the kids. Are you kidding me? Well, I reluctantly go with him for I know this is a battle I cannot win. We buy five more bags of toys that I (Oy!) have to wrap. Then, on Christmas Eve, without fail, my husband tells me has a few more things he forgot to take out of his trunk. Can I please wrap them? OMG.
