there is and always has been 2 yearly christmas traditions that I hate in my family.
the first is the christmas pageant and midnight mass on christmas eve, and then more church on christmas day. These I mostly solved by converting to Judaism, although my mother still sometimes convenienetly forgets that I'm Jewish now, and that means she can't make me go to church and worship her tri-fold G-d.
the second is this scourge of an inexplicable Christmas day hike up the blue hills. I woke up screaming "nobody cares what I want to do! what I like to do is sleep! It isn't even Christmas to me! You're celebrating the birth of someone I consider to be a prophet but not the messiah! I want to be with other Jews watching movies and eating Chinese food and giving each other presents just for the consumer thrill of it all and because presents, and sleeping, are things that make people happy! (which incidentally, I will be doing later on with Jeremy's family).
this falls on deaf ears, of course. My brother reverses the course of my progress to making my mother feel terrible about her religious/cultural oppression by saying "ignore her, she's just cranky". Goddammit! I'm not cranky! I'm a cranky Jew!
off to the fucking hike.
December 25, 2008
the fucking christmas day hike
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2 comments:
You should have come with me to Kung Pao Kosher Comedy in Chinatown last night. The menschen and the macher were kvetching a'plenty.
First of all, your brother advanced your argument more than he retarded it.
Secondly, there needs to be a conversation about the fact that Jewish Christmas is, if anything, more ritualized qua holiday than Christian Christmas. Christians do all sorts of stuff, they go for hikes and they go to church and they watch TV and whatever. But Jews...there's no such diversity! It's Chinese food and a movie! How has this come to pass, and how do we not more-actively celebrate the irony?
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