Fa La La La La...La La
Fern: I looked out the window this morning and thought of my grandmother. Mann Tracht, Un Gott Lacht is Yiddish for Man Plans and God Laughs. In Iowa, this expression should be used frequently. Because of -- you know… weather.
Joe: There was the cancellation of the Christmas party for the Iowa Writer’s Collaborative tonight. But we weren’t going anyway. I am not fond of big parties. And you hate winter driving.
Fern: I Iike parties. But yes, I am a scaredy-cat when it comes to driving in bad weather. Probably this comes from my driving on an icy highway when I was in my twenties and totaling the car. I passed out and woke up in the snow. Despite my agnosticism, I thought I was in heaven.
Joe: You would.
Fern: But anyway, we sent out regrets for the party, without knowing of the impending ice storm. And then this morning, there was a flurry of emails – before the flurry of snow and ice or whatever else was in store. We still have a date for a Hanukkah party next weekend with old friends, but it’s weather dependent.
Joe: There was a time when we were the drivers for the old folks going to Des Moines for the Hanukkah party,
Fern: Now we’re the old folks. Amazing that you can still drive at night.
Joe: That’s what makes me popular with the ladies.
Fern: I thought we could wait for the ice storm and write a homey-holiday column. And then I thought, what is left to say?
Joe: You’re not going to get all MAGA-Mad during this holy season, are you?
Fern: No. I thought about resurrecting one we wrote a few years ago? Will anyone remember?
Joe: I don’t even remember.
Fern: We had a holiday column two years ago in our Substack. Some of it actually appeared years before that in the Ames Tribune. And maybe twenty years before that, when I wrote for Newsday. You know, in the Before Times. When we had newspapers.
Joe: Sort of like that old Christmas tradition of reusing old ornaments. Good way to recycle, too. Ok. I’ll look and see if I can find it.
Fern: Christmas is a holiday I see through the eyes of an outsider. Something my Jewish family never celebrated. Do you have good Christmas memories?
Joe: Some of them. My earliest Christmas memories are from my family’s first years in America. In the old country Christmas was strictly a religious holiday, but over here it was a different story.
My dad was very big on two fairly contradictory things: one, remember who you are, meaning the heritage, the language, the culture, of your birth; and two, learn the new culture and assimilate into it.
So there are multicolored Christmas lights in my memory of our apartment above my father’s grocery store. I am wearing a brand new cowboy hat and waving two brand new clickity tin pistols as I mosey past the radio in the front room. On the radio is a song about “decking the halls,” which, I remember being confused about. Surely it meant something to the Amerkain but “fa la la la la la la?” Who talked like that?
Fern: I lived in a Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx but the public school celebrated Christmas with unbridled enthusiasm. Despite the fact that hardly any of the children at P.S. 95 had a Christmas tree at home, we cut and colored ornaments and made angels. One teacher had a decorated tree on a table in the back of the room and we placed her gifts there.
We sang carols with reverence: Fall to your knees. Oh, hear the angel voices. Oh, night divine, oh, night when Christ was born. Those songs are so much more beautiful than Jingle Bells.
We put on Christmas plays attended by our parents and old-country grandparents. Perhaps because in the 1950s, Jewish people desired a quiet assimilation after the horrors of a genocidal war, there were not any complaints that Christmas was a religious holiday — and certainly not ours.
I recall the pangs of tenderness I felt for the baby Jesus in a straw-filled manger surrounded by wise men who had schlepped so far to see him. To me, a little girl who would grow up to be a writer, the story of a baby born in a barn because no one would welcome his parents made for a compelling narrative.
Joe: So did you believe in Santa Claus?
Fern: No. I grew up in a very iconoclastic household. My mother, especially. She pretty much told the truth about everything. So there was no stork delivering babies. No tooth fairy. No Santa. Once my grandmother was going to take me to Macys to see Santa (why, I don’t know since I never got Christmas presents) and I had just seen a Santa at a different store. My mother said, “Well, the stores hire men to dress up in a Santa costume. So there’s a lot of them.”
Joe: Did you feel bad about not celebrating Christmas? Excluded?
Fern: I don’t think I did. I felt grown-up actually. Especially about how babies were born and knowing that Santa wasn’t real. I liked knowing the truth.
Joe: My dad encouraged us to listen to the radio and go to movies, thinking that we’d absorb the culture that way. And Christmas, American style, was a part of that. So he bought us a tree—which none of us knew how to make stand up. My mother solved the problem by tying lengths of her knitting yarn to its scrawny top and half-suspending it from two corner window rods.
One early Christmas memory is of my brother and sister and I sitting around the kitchen table and trying not to giggle because the radio was singing about the Baby Jesus sleeping in heavenly pee.
But there were many Jewish families in our neighborhood in Toledo, Ohio. So I heard about Hanukkah. I thought of it as Jewish Christmas.
Fern: It’s certainly turned into that today. But Hanukkah is a fairly minor Jewish holiday. And –- true to form –- was barely celebrated by my family. My grandparents spoke Yiddish and kept Kosher. Our Jewishness was defined around food, language and humor.
On Hanukkah we went to my grandparents’ apartment, where my brother and I were presented with foil-covered chocolate Hanukkah gelt which we unwrapped and devoured on the spot.
There were no other gifts. As our family was leaving to go home, my grandmother would go to her pocketbook, slowly take out her coin purse and ceremoniously give my brother and I each a twenty dollar bill. “For Kolletch,” she said with her heavily inflected accent.
I held the bill in my hand for only seconds before it was confiscated by my father, who said the money would be put in the bank. Not until I was a teenager did I understand that “Kolletch” meant the place I was expected to go to after high school.
Joe: I think my most vivid Christmas memories aren’t from my own childhood, but that of my two daughters. When Katie was three I explained to her how Santa Claus was this old man with a big beard and how he slid down the chimney while we slept. She stepped back and her eyes widened with fear—and I realized I’d just described a home invasion.
Fern: When my family moved from the Bronx to Long Island, land of ethnic Jews and Italians and generic Americans, everyone was white, but more “mixed” than the old neighborhood. My mother sold real estate, and December was a busy time. Jewish couples from the city drove around looking for a block with no Christmas lights: a “Jewish area.” The public schools still had Christmas concerts, but there was the recognition that the holiday was not celebrated by everyone.
Joe: Then how was it for you moving to Iowa? And having your first child here?
Fern: I remember Gabi home from kindergarten and announcing: “Mom, I am the only Hanukkah child in my whole class!” She seemed ok with that, although she wasn’t exactly sure what it meant. Of course, I was asked to go to school to explain to the class “the meaning of Hanukkah” — something my own irreligious parents had apparently neglected to teach me. I had some research to do. It’s actually a pretty military holiday.
Joe: I think my very fondest Christmas memory is from the first one the girls and I spent alone together after I was divorced. The girls were four and seven, and it was a week or so before Christmas. I’d given the girls their baths and sat them wrapped in bath towels in front of our black-and-white tv to watch Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Meanwhile I made popcorn using an old-fashioned popper over the fire in the fireplace. And that’s a good Christmas memory: they were fed, bathed and cozy, eating popcorn and watching Rudolph.
Fern: Nice memories, Christmas is good for that, I suppose, but to tell you the truth, I’m relieved to have a free pass not to participate.
Joe: Oh, you get a kick out of acting the Grinch.
Fern: But look how many people complain about the pressures of getting ready for Christmas, the depression that affects so many around the holiday. “Not my holiday,” is kind of relief. I do like the egg nog, though.
Joe: After we were married and bringing the girls up together you got into having a tree, shopping, wrapping presents, the whole schmeer. You were enjoying more than just the egg nog.
Fern: Once the girls were grown and we were moving into our new, smaller house, one of the first things to go into the dumpster was that old artificial tree you put together each year.
Joe: Since then, not so much as a sprig of holly. Fa la la la la.
Fern: So, my question for you is: Do you miss not celebrating, by living with me?
Joe: Not for a minute. Scrooge might have been on to something.
Fern: Christians may lament the secularization of Christmas, but strangely, I do as well. The Christmas season of my childhood was a time of poignancy and wonder — even for a little Jewish girl whose parents were free-thinkers and whose grandparents gave her only expectations.
Two short stories: We went to Jewell (20 miles or so) for our friend's birthday party. It started snowing--so we scurried into our car and drove home. I grew up in Iowa and my parents were newspaper circulation managers, so driving in snow is usually second nature--but I couldn't see a thing. Finally Mark rolled down the window and he told me when to turn. We made it home but it was a nasty trip.
The second story: Both my son and his daughter went over to the fireplace, looked up the chimney and said "Santa is just a story, isn't it?" My son was just 27 months old and his daughter about the same. Sometimes it's the kids who take the charm out of Christmas but at least Erik helped us play Santa to his younger sister.
Thank you, once again, for the stories, the smiles, and the out loud laughter! Happy Everything to the two of you 🥂!