The Allure of Christmas
By Evelyn Block
I was nine years old and had only recently been allowed to walk home alone from Hebrew School after dark. Walking near the curb so I could climb on the mounds of icy snow left from the last snowstorm, I inhaled the scent of pine from the Christmas trees being sold by peddlers on the street corners. My friends all lived on the “better” side of Broadway and headed off in the opposite direction
The winter vacation had already started for New York City public schools and I resented having to go to Hebrew School that afternoon. I had gotten in trouble that day when I told my teacher that I didn’t want to play dreidel; it was a stupid game. Spinning a top for pennies wasn’t my idea of fun, especially when other kids were home preparing for Santa Claus. He made me play anyway and said my sister would never say anything so blasphemous.
As if I cared. My sister believed that her own survival depended on being good. I was the U.S.-born rebel who lived in a crazy immigrant family from France.
Stores and apartment windows were brightly decorated; TV programs and commercials were showing all the fun of Christmas with lights, music, presents and large families together. Even at school, we had sung all these beautiful songs: O Come All Ye Faithful, Silent Night, O Little Town of Bethlehem. I felt like a traitor for loving all the Christmas music, for wanting gingerbread houses instead of latkes.
And my family couldn’t even do Hanukkah right. My Jewish friends got eight presents, one for each night, but all I had received that year was a new briefcase for school. I liked it well enough, but it came loaded with an admonition: I was wrong to want more when I was among the “lucky” ones whose parents had survived humiliation, degradation, starvation and all the other horrors of war.
My parents weren’t good Jews anyway. They both worked on the Sabbath. My grandfather who came to this country after the Nazis destroyed his business always said there was no God because if there were a God, he wouldn’t have let the Jews be killed. He refused to go to synagogue and here I was traipsing home from stupid Hebrew School. I wanted to celebrate Christmas.
It was cold that December evening; I shivered as I turned the corner. There on the street was a fairly large strand of pine, looking as if it had been accidentally torn off of one of the trees. I picked it up and inhaled its scent. I ran the rest of the way home with my branch and waited impatiently as my sister unlocked the three locks to let me in. I had my own Christmas tree!
I ran into the kitchen in search of something to put my “tree” into and finally settled on a tall glass—we had no vases. I put the branch in the glass and went into the living room singing, “Silent night, holy night…” My mother was ironing while watching TV. She looked up at me. She didn’t say a word; it was in her eyes. She held on to her silence in way that said more than any words could have. I grabbed the branch and glass and ran back into the kitchen.
I felt shame then. For wanting to be something I was not. For forgetting that I was the link between the obliterated past and the future.
I told my mother I was sorry. I threw the bough in the trash. I decided I would be a happy Jew, make my parents proud and somehow heal their broken spirits. And anyway, we didn’t have a chimney.
This essay is part of our series on the topic “Holidays?”
Evelyn Block is a child and family therapist and writer. She is the author of the children’s book “September 11, 2001: A Day in History.”