[img]1|left|Ari Noonan||no_popup[/img]A lady in my nearly empty working quarters approached me yesterday morning and asked, What do Jews do on Christmas?
Happily, she did not pose that heartfelt query for an old editor of mine, in Koreatown, who lived with his gentile girlfriend, who was very few decades younger. It was Christmas Eve of 1990. I just had been freshly divorced, nowhere to go, and along with a couple other reporters was working on into the evening.
Not our bearded, ostensibly Jewish editor who resembled any character in a Sholem Aleichem tale, who never believed in potentially shrinking his life with hard work. As if his pants were in flames, he fairly sprinted across the newsroom, dodging around typewriters, desks and stray pens rolling across the door.
No one had seen him move like a blur.
“Where are you going?” a colleague shouted, expecting a shrugoff response, his specialty.
Halting suddenly, my editor’s normally discouraging visage erupted into a golden chandelier. Weren’t those heavenly harps being strummed in the background?
Like most non- or anti-religious politically far-left Jews, he did not know Shavuous from Succos. Or care.
His happily interrupted mug was a Pulitzer photo waiting to be memorialized.
No slave to fashion, the self-ordained Smartest Man in Any Space I Occupy was giddily pregnant with anticipation.
You could see his lips moving –
Thank God someone had the seichel to ask me.
Seemed a shame to waste his miniature oration on such a slim audience, three or four wretchedly underpaid journalists who weren’t that interested.
Shamelessly, as if he and his suffocatingly liberal sui generis mind were dangling, heroically, from the crown of his beloved Brooklyn Bridge, my editor sounded like a lottery winner.
“Have to hurry home and get dressed,” he chirped, and I swear he was swaying as he rhapsodized. “We are going to Midnight Mass. The music is soooo beautiful.”
Hopefully, he was the only Jew in the church that evening – but don’t make book on that.
I handed my building-mate a more succinct response to the question of what do Jews do on Christmas.
In my home, the tradition has been a movie and Chinatown.
Not today, though. A classmate of my wife’s has been in increasingly declining health. She prefers to be stationary. When we left her home the other evening, I told her to stay on the couch and we would secure the front door. Walking down the driveway, my wife said, “We don’t have to go to Chinatown on Christmas, do we?” Widowed, with her married children away, and her boyfriend back in his home state, unavailable because of a relative’s death, she would have been alone.
Chinatown will wait. We did the movie last evening, another custom.
Merry Christmas, everyone.
