My Christmas story "Christmas in the City" -- Christmas season story, actually -- is up this week on Beneaththerainbow.com, a busy online story journal that's becoming one of my favorite sites. The story has a lot of traveling in it. If you're a couple you go to see one partner's family, then the other's. If the two families live reasonably close to one another, both in the New York City area, say, you try to do all the traveling and visiting in one trip. It's a question of how much "relativity" can you pack into a few days.
Here's the beginning of the story:
On the night before the night before Christmas we drove down from our home by the ocean through the rain forest of Connecticut, watching the sky turn to moist, violet hues as we pushed into the ambient light pollution of denser realms. Human settlements: cars and houses and shopping centers. The rain passed, we were home free, or so we thought, but somebody had reorganized the highway since our last visit and we found ourselves staring the Tappan Zee Bridge in the ominous face before choosing the desperate extremity of “last exit.” Last exit deposited us into a bedroom community where Santa tiptoed on cat paws, but neither of us had ever set foot.
“Hastings-on-Hudson,” I marveled. “What kind of a name is Hastings-on-Hudson? If you see Jacob Marley hitchhiking, don’t pick him up.”
The story includes my take on what the news media insisted on calling "the December Dilemma." The tired premise for these Living Page feature stories is that Jewish-Christian interfaith families are supposed to have difficulties deciding which of the December holiday traditions to follow. Do we celebrate Christmas or Hanukkah? Whose family should we visit, your Jewish one with those nine-candle Menorahs and that funny-sounding prayer? Or my Christian one, with my non-churchgoing Dad, the live tree in your living room with all those colored lights, and the December electric bill from all that extra lighting?Seriously, folks, where's the dilemma? We do them both, naturally. The kids get more presents, more candy, more attention from the grandparents.
The parents get to drive all over creation, going from one house to another, taking in the sights in Midtown, Rockefeller Center and the Metropolitan Museum. Christmas dinner and carol singing on Long Island. My wife, as "Christmas in the City" points out
...hates the December Dilemma. We solved the so-called, over-hyped bi-religious dilemma at home by putting the Hanukkah candles in the dining room and the sacrificial tree, symbolical axis mundi of the pagan solstice festival, in the living room. The kids get twice as many presents. We eat latkes on the first night of Hanukkah, seasoned with a little blood via hand-grating the potatoes. We exchange Christmas presents some evening, or morning (never on December twenty-fifth), whenever it’s convenient to our travel schedule. We travel to nostalgic New York to spend the day of days with my parents in the house where I grew up and seem unable to get away from, at least far enough to have an excuse not to go there for Christmas. But we also go to the Bronx, to see Sharon’s parents and watch a video treatment of “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” which is exempted from Sharon’s core values because it goes beyond mere warm-and-wonderful nostalgic to non-denominationally entertaining. So she says. Actually, I think she’s jealous.
As one of our friends pointed out after reading "Christmas in the City," the story is really a disguised memoir with "the names changed to protect the innocent."
Yes, it is. You'll note that my name is on it, because I'm not one of the innocent. I'm the perpetrator. I wrote the story about ten years ago. It was fun to see it again.
To read the rest of it, go to:
http://beneaththerainbow.com/christmas-in-the-city/
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