Holidays

Today is Christmas. It’s been a holiday week.

The first night of Chanukah, we went to Peter’s Armenian family Christmas, their

ninety ninth year of celebrating their family’s arrival to this country from Armenian

genocide in Turkey. 

Their journey here was difficult – the genocide took many of their relatives, and all

these years later, that history is very much part of the present. We all take turns

hosting.  This year the party was held in New Jersey, at the home of a young couple

with two small children.  Usually around fifty people appear.  Now there are about 15

young children, cousins, happy to meet once a year. Peter’s relatives are a large mix of

politics and professions. From left to right.  From a pianist doctor to a laundromat

owner. They work hard to get along, in spite of their very

different lifestyles, in spite of their different politics.  Their central activities are

eating and talking.  Food is often elaborate, especially the hors d’oevres:  stuffed grape

leaves, filo dough filled with cheese, delicious Armenian meats.  This year the full bar

included a 20 year old brandy from Yerevan.  Many of us drank it happily.  I ordered a

bottle online when we came home.

The second night of Chanukah we made latkes and an Iraqi Jewish leek dish and

invited the kids here and a few of their friends, and cousins of Peter’s, a couple from

Richmond who’d come up for the party the day before.  They’re serious Christians,

religious, conservative, the parents of three young daughters.  They’d never been to a

Chanukah before.

Our 22 year old non-binary African grandchild brought two Chanukah guests – two

othernon-binary Mellon fellows from Hunter. All three are in their senior year full of

radical politics, gender ideas, and hope..  Ariana, a Bengali pre-law student, and

Daniel, an Uzbeki Jew from Forest Hills whose parents moved to Queens when he was

young. He says they are communists still, although the father is a New York City

policeman now.

We all said the Chanukah baracha, lit the Menorah, ate latkes, and had a long

conversationabout where light comes from (more or less everywhere), what Truth

means, and whether or not latkes should have any other vegetables besides potatoes

(ours had carrots and leeks).

In my childhood home we would celebrate Chanukah with our family’s closest friends

wholived in a nearby town.  They were Jewish too, and we would light candles, and eat

a lot.  My family loved brisket, and in my childhood memory (which may or may not be

true) brisket played a role in more or less every holiday.  We had a butcher who

actually came to his house –Ike Katzman, a thin single man who my mother constantly

set up on dates.  Eventually IkeKatzman married Inez but he never said much about

her when he dropped off our brisket.

Today, on Christmas Day, in a very cold New York City, we’ll light the eighth

candle, then go to a Christmas meal with the kids and take Ahava to the Big Apple

Circus.

This is not meant to be a recitation of activities, the way some people’s holiday letters

can be: we did this and we did that.  Just a gentle exploration, maybe only a beginning,

of holidays and how they’ve evolved in my own lifetime – changed, if you like that

word better.  What changes, and what stays the same. Whenever we gain something,

we lose something else. A hard lesson to understand, even now.

Many of us enjoy celebrating. Sometimes, who and how is more the story. Happy All

Holidays to All Altes. Love Esther