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XMAS

Writer's picture: Shoga FilmsShoga Films

Updated: Jan 28


We were talking about Christmas, about the Christmas tree, and we never called it a Chanukah bush.  I must have heard that somewhere else.  We decorated it with bulbs and tinsel, and it stood beautifully in the corner with the fireplace flames reflected in the colored balls.  The cats would play with the ornaments, and there was the inevitable Christmas when one of them pulled the whole tree over.  My mother baked cookies to put in the playroom for Santa, and I wondered how he came down the chimney without getting sooty.   


 The mounted moose head above the piano wore false eyelashes and dangled a cigarette from its lips. And when some innocent visitor asked where the rest of the moose was, expecting no doubt to hear that it was packed in the freezer, my father replied, “It’s hanging out the back.”  And at Christmas we decorated his antlers with bulbs and tinsel. 


 But it wasn’t all Christmas, and after all, the tree was thrown by the woodpile after it had turned brown and its needles were falling to the floor.  The crickets sang outside my window every night, and sometimes I would run to the garage and piss in the bushes, shivering from the cold and knowing I would soon be under the covers again. 


We were talking about Christmas, and every year we'd get Slinkies and every year we'd stretch or tangle them, but toys were made to be broken, and nobody much cared.  Only the wagon stayed relatively intact, rusting every year into further dissolution, but red, after its fashion, and four-wheeled, the essence of a wagon.       


I'm not going to say we were talking about Christmas again, because it was all Christmas, even though my mother tried lighting Chanukah candles for a few years.  It never took. My sister killed the elm tree in the backyard lawn by hosing soapy water from the horse's washing into its pit. And I accidentally knocked a croquet ball into my brother’s aquarium after he had washed it and left it out to dry.  (And when I was seventeen, I tried to keep track of how many times I heard "White Christmas" between Thanksgiving and New Year's, losing count after thirty-six.) 

I suppose we were different – my parents certainly thought so. I was not popular in school, but the difference didn’t explain why my brother played so well in Little League.  My childhood idol, Steve Lewis, organized our games of sandlot football before his father built a house on the playing field.  Steve was blond and big and athletic and tolerated my company, and it was only later that his father became a member of the John Birch Society. Maybe that’s why he stopped playing with me.  


 And we weren't talking about Christmas so much anymore because we had grown up some and the aerospace depression had hit, and there were better things to spend the money on.  But we still had a tree, and some of the neighbors hung colored lights from the roof eaves, and Hastings Ranch, just across the canyon, put on such a big seasonal display that tour buses started coming through. Each street would have a series of the same cut-outs in front of each house: angels in blue dresses holding gold books, four-foot candy canes tilted at a similar angle, giant Christmas cards with season’s greetings displayed in different languages. Individual houses boasted their own displays: Santa's helpers skating on mechanized wheels, an automatic slide show of the Nativity, sleighs and snowbells on irrigated lawns, a world of lights and cardboard wishing you a Merry Christmas.  (I laughed so hard at the six-foot figure of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer holding a champagne glass and hiccupping "Bingle Jells.")  And, yes, we caroled along with others in the neighborhood.  “O come O come, Emmanuel/To free your captive Israel.” 


 Blood. By blood. By tradition and blood. By memories, tradition and blood. What memories? What tradition? We were talking about Christmas; we weren't talking about the paschal lamb.  We were talking turkey if we were talking anything, and the calendar cut-outs at elementary school were pumpkins for the month of October and holly wreaths in December. We were talking about Christmas, though some were talking about Auschwitz, and the rain made the roof slick so that it was dangerous to climb and adjust the antenna, but nobody ever fell, and the mudslides from the mountains never hit us, though there was always a chance that they might. 

  

-Robert Philipson 


Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, Chanukah vs. Christmas – The Underdog Loses

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