“A Jew-Child’s Christmas in Santa Monica” by Max Goldblatt

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six. — Dylan Thomas 

When I was a little boy we had a massive Ficus tree in the living room. Big Ben was it’s name, a play on the the scientific name Ficus benjamina. Each year during Hanukkah (and Christmas — I’ll get to that later) my parents would put my presents under this tree and I would wake up at the crack of dawn like a little tweaker and scamper upstairs to rip them open and generally freak out. I guess, traditionally, kids scamper downstairs to get their presents or scamper laterally through, say, a ranch-style house. But we lived in an unconventional Santa Monica apartment with the bedrooms a level below the living room. So I scampered up.

  I would imagine the neatly wrapped-gifts waiting patiently a floor above me. They were oblivious to the fact that I was fixating on them from below. If only they knew! I would wake up in the middle of the night and sorta sleep-walk upstairs to examine and shake the boxes, trying to figure out what could be inside and then, remembering that the act of opening a present is theoretically as much about the gift-giver as the recipient, I would leave my loot unmolested and go back to bed. I imagine every child engages in such sneakiness.

The holiday season was a wee bit confusing out by the beach. All the wintry imagery was completely alien to little me. Neither blankets of snow nor fir trees figured into this world; we could see the Pacific ocean from our terrace, tanned and toned bodybuilders were everywhere, it was usually t-shirt weather. And at this point I had never even seen real snow (years later, at college back East, I boldly declared that the stuff was little more than glorified mud). The ficus in our apartment may not have been a Christmas tree (or a Hanukkah bush, if that’s even a real thing — I’ve never seen one), but we pretended it was one, or something like one. And this West-coast hippy version of a Christmas tree only elevated my confusion. This was supposedly some big festive holiday time but, in my little kid head, it was just me and my folks in our apartment by the beach. No Santa, no carolers… and I got presents for no apparent reason. Not that I was going to question any senseless gifting.

Big surprise: growing up I was an only child. I still am. Or an only adult, rather. So presents were, clearly, very important to me. I worked out a weird sort of con, wherein I received a different present each night of Hanukkah and then I got a few on Christmas too because my Dad shares his birthday with the baby Jesus. And the only child (me, not the baby Jesus) just had to be included in the Christmas morning free-for-all, otherwise there’d have been hell to pay. I mean isn’t that the whole point of Hanukkah? Give your Jewish kids presents for eight successive nights so they don’t feel inferior to their gentile friends who have the better publicized holiday, the biggest and best of all the holidays? And what parent would want their little one to grow up with an even bigger inferiority complex because Daddy gets gifts on the goyische holiday and they don’t? No parent, that’s who. So they humored me.

Jumping ahead now: the ficus died at some point (the details are vague in my mind) and my parents moved further away from the beach, into a house in a nice Jewish neighborhood. It was the 90s and the place was built in the 40s and I was nine and in this new home I became a lateral scamperer. Things were changing. Further ahead now: instead of toys I wanted a dog. I wanted a guitar. I wanted gift certificates. A camera. A computer. I went to college. I moved out.

In the past few years we have settled on a single day, catch-all, Hanukkah gift-exchange/Dad’s birthday extravaganza. It is, unsurprisingly, on Christmas morning, no matter when Hanukkah may fall. It’s just easier this way. Now all the gifts sit in front of my parents’ fireplace (so Christmasy, I know). I play Santa (I know) and scamper around the living room, distributing gifts and wrangling wrapping paper. I’ve become decidedly less interested in my presents and more interested in watching the excitement on my parents’ faces as they open theirs. Then we cook breakfast: usually it’s French toast made using panettone, a sweet Italian bread loaf traditionally served on Christmas (I know, I know, I know). At some point we will usually end up watching Alaister Sim in the 1951 film of A Christmas Carol. We’ve pretty much eradicated Hanukkah. We light a menorah and go to a latke party, but that’s the extent of it.

When I think of the holiday season, I don’t really think about Hanukkah. As anachronistic as it may seem, I think about three Jews on Christmas morning. No carolers, no tree, no Yule log. Just us.