No wonder I rarely got a tree. It’s just too much work. Going out to buy it. Schlepping it home. Carting it inside. Pine needles everywhere. Finding the box with the decorations in storage. Untangling the lights. Discovering that only some are still working. I’m not that together. I have zero organizational skills. Hey, if magical elves appeared in my home to set up the tree, and I didn’t have to go to the lot or do anything, I would reconsider.
And then, of course, there is the religion factor. To get a tree or not to get a tree. Since half of me is Jewish and the other half vague, it’s easier to just call myself a Jew. A tree never seemed to bother other Jewish families when I was growing up in Beverly Hills. This time of year, everyone became his or her own Hollywood set decorator. Each family outdid the next. Talk about keeping up with the Joneses --only in this case the Jimmy Stewarts.
Lets’ face it a Christmas tree is an indicator of taste. Pink-flocked ones seem a bit “Liberace” to me. But I kind of dig a pink tree. A very close friend growing up lived in a home with wall-to-wall white shag carpeting and lots of gaudy gold-trimmed fixtures. Her prematurely blue-haired mother always matched their blue-flocked Christmas tree. Each year I thought wow, everyone’s trees are getting bigger and bigger. Like bigger is better. They seemed to reach the ceiling in some homes and I would think, okay, we can see you have a big penis.
We have a traditional Christmas dinner. We've been doing it for twenty-two years. There are fourteen people involved – eight parents and six children – and we all get together at Jim and Phoebe's during
Christmas week to exchange presents and make predictions about events
in the coming year.
My family, while I grew up in Iowa in the 1970's, had no traditions save one. For 364 dinner days of the year, it was my mother who performed culinary magic at home. (Today her dinners would be heralded by food critics as tempura-style but back then it was just “frying floured foods in fat”.) Her lipid of choice was Crisco but on Christmas Eve the can of Crisco was put away and my father took out the stew pots.
Though everyone thinks their family is odd, mine was definitely unique, at least in my neighborhood. Both my parents are only children, which made holiday celebrations a little somber since there were no siblings or cousins to play with or share the scrutiny of my grandparents’ expectations.