Solstice Tree

When Zach was 4 we got our first Christmas tree as a family. Is it a Christmas tree? I don't know. And after 2 years of telling him, no, we don't get a tree because we celebrate Chanukah -- one of which involved a riciulous display of blue and white string lights and a light-up menorah to appease his sadness, the thing that put me over the edge in needing one was my mother's death. Ironic I suppose, since she's the source of my Judaism. But I found myself shopping at the Wagon Wheel -- a small farm stand near home -- in a row of freshly cut trees. The scent grabbed me by the hand and brought me back to hazy happy years of my split-personality childhood, when my parents both lived under one roof and my Jewish mother embraced my father's German tradition of the holiday tree - oh, and the holiday baked goods.

As little kids, Santa came, there were spritz cookies and medieval holiday chants on the record player.  I have not figured out how this all came together with my mother other than as an act of rebellion, as she would not even come close to discussing her consumption of shellfish with her own parents.

My father moved out the summer after kindergarten to a house in the middle of the woods, where he would take us out to find a wispy white pine thinning which would be propped up and hung with orgami birds and sometimes gingerbread men, baked by his new Jewish wife. He loved Christmas music (classical only), and each year would go on about the tree being a pagan symbol for winter solstice. He loved -- and still loves -- all metaphoric religious ritual.

My mother tried to keep the tree thing going with my sister and me, but as we got older the tree got wimpier and eventually fizzled out. In fact, one year when I was in middle school I'm pretty sure she made a tree-like prop out of an old wrapping paper roll and several pine branches poked in alternating lateral rows. After that they stopped appearing altogether. We lit Chanukah candles, sure, too -- usually accompanied by my tired, stressed mother pulling something out of a TJmaxx bag for my sister and me. She occasionally would make latkes, which was an ordeal,  but that was about it. Christmas day, however, we would sit around in our pjs all morning eating candied nuts and opening small gifts and would often end up celebrating Thanksgiving with whichever parent had missed the holiday in November.

I spent time in college attempting to cultivate a more Jewish identity. I attended Friday night and Passover dinners with the campus Hillel, and dated 2 Jewish men. The first one actually kept kosher -- something I had, to date, only experienced with my grandparents and their siblings. The second one only celebrated the major Jewish holidays, and I eventually married him.

At first I was surprised to learn that Josh's mother sent him Easter care packages filled with items very similar to his Halloween care package -- candy, little themed toys, pez dispensers. But I got used to it. I too had Easter baskets as a child. So, we too made chocolate bunnies magically appear on Easter morning for our toddler son. It wasn't until Zach started asking about a Christmas tree, which Josh flatly opposed, that I became struck by the irony. I'm not a religious scholar, but on liturgy alone, Easter seems the most Christ-focused of all Christian holidays, tied together with what I can only assume are Passover plus Pagan egg and bunny leftovers.

As I became an adult, my mother stopped putting up trees but she did continue putting the Messiah on repeat every December and would occasionally still make spritz cookies. We continued celebrating belated Thanksgiving and gathering as a family on the 25th since that was one of the few times my sister and I both could take off and travel to mom's new home in Virginia.

So here I am, now back in the present, standing in the row of trees at the Wagon Wheel farm stand, completely overtaken by the smell of pine, the smell of my pre-angst toddler winters. My mother had died 6 months previously and the past felt like it collapsed on top of me in a heap of unattainable happiness. Even though this was the same year in which I enrolled Zach in Hebrew school, despite earlier ambivalence, I needed a winter fir tree in my house.

In the end we decided to surprise Zach by tree-shopping without him several days before December 25. The farm stand was of course empty, it being so late in the season, but glad to get rid of one more tree. Of course we also needed to buy a stand, a skirt, lights...  I felt a strange mixture of guilt, pleasure, and fear of judgement from friends, watching the trunk through the sunroof on the ride home.

We didn't bother buying decorations so I covered it in old wrapping bows and we all found ourselves just sitting, staring the thing down, mesmerized, taking in the pine smell and all those tiny points of light. Four-year-old Zach would repeat every few days how much he loved to look at it.

We didn't celebrate Christmas differently than we would have in the past as a result. We still sat around in our pjs all morning -- no reason to get dressed when the rest of the world more or less shuts down -- then went to our Hindu/non-practicing Christian friends' for Christmas Dinner to eat ham and indulge in other fun timely rituals such as that Pandora mix based on Bing Crosby's Silver Bells, and reindeer-shaped sugar cookies painted in red and green icing.

And we still celebrated Chanukah, exactly as we had in the past.

We have since learned a few practical bits about dealing with drying pine needles and when the thing has to be on the curb if you want it picked up before March. I still fear judgement from my friends, but try to remind myself that I have consciously chosen this defiant act of inclusion over exclusion, taking cue from my father and embracing it all when it comes to ritual.

Jolly Euro-pagan Solstice, Happy Chanukah, and yes, Merry Christmas too.

For mom's unveiling

It hasn't quite been a year since my mother left us. As much as I miss her and found it jarring not to have her a phone call away anymore, I have realized just how much of her I carry around with me each day. Of course there are the physical artifacts: lush green pottery coffee cups, a painted wooden chicken that greets me when I walk into my house, the gold-framed mirror that hangs opposite my bed, a handful of necklaces, earrings, and socks with tiger stripes and ladybugs... things I didn't need but remind me each day of her passionate aesthetic sense, one that combined humor with Victorian flare, and usually on a thrift store budget.

I'm also beginning to recognize her various lessons and inclinations I hadn't till recently realized that I carry: A hatred for waste - I can almost hear her voice behind me when I cut the moldy edges off a block of cheese that's otherwise still fine... flare for the unexpected and quirky, when I bake blueberry muffins in 3-D dinosaur shapes (a tin she had gotten for me, of course). An inability to sit still and just...relax...when there are things to be seen -- parades, sheep shearing festivals, the ocean... Unabashed, nagging awe for small objects or details that have in some way achieved perfection: white daylilies in the height of bloom -- or a fresh boiled lobster (and when I say nagging, I mean that she would nag me, literally, to acknowledge agreement of the superlative).

Obscure memories of the time we shared have begun unfurling, as her life is now spread behind us as a complete tapestry. The years when she raised me seem just as far away as the later ones. These memories come and they go, often at unexpected moments:

Eating chocolate twizzlers on the Staten Island Ferry... inspecting all the potted plants (yes, all of them) and fresh-picked peas at Paisley's farm stand....The rose-colored, pleated, corduroy sailor dress she sewed for me before the start of 6th grade (it was amazing, at least by the standards of 1986 fashion)... The lights in our eyes in a community chorus concert at a local Elks lodge -- at the time she was in her 40s, I was about 12... Pepperidge Farm cookies in her office at school between classes...Stopping to read the plaque on Every. Single. exhibit at the Pompideau art museum in Paris, then cream puffs at the fountain outside...

Good memories. She did not waste her time here. I will try to share her lessons with my children. I wish of course that she were still here to share them herself, but I know she's never going to be all that far off, as long as I can keep these memories close at hand.

Miss you. 

My Outsourced Seder

Walking through the parking lot at 5:10 on the evening of the start of Passover with no plan for the night. But I was concerned about providing continuity for my children. Wanting for them to taste matzoh with horseradish and be taken back to those elusive moments in their childhood when time stood still. It's not about G-d, though. I'm a proud but aetheist Jew. Contradiction? Officially, I suppose.

So what to do? I'm ashamed to admit, but I appeared at the prepared foods counter at Whole Foods in Natick and exhaled with wide eyes upon finding pre-made (vegan) matzoh balls, chopped liver, lamb roast slices, brisket, gefilte fish... potato pancakes in 3 varieties, and, yes, matzoh kugel muffins. I could do this. One quick run over to produce for some bitter herbs (celery), a pit stop for cream cheese and whitefish for the weekend, and I was off, back home where Josh had the kids and was boiling eggs.

Our seder lacked the decorum of those held at my grandparents' house. The hagaddah was an illustrated kids' book. Alisha gnawed on matzoh and threw Whole Food's cashew apricot charoset on the floor. And Zach used the gnarly beet representing a lamb shank bone that I'd placed on my grandparents' turquoise and gold seder plate as a hammer at intervals, before being allowed to start the meal with those matzoh balls which were reheating in organic boxed broth on the stove. We finished with a well-intentioned but ill-conceived chocolate chip bundt cake from Grandma Estee, a brief history lesson about slavery, and of course the delicious afikomen, purchased from Zachary for the low price of $2.

We pulled it together, but next year, I'm hoping to gather a larger table of friends. Not to mention a home-made apple-matzoh kugel.