Christmas Story: What Do Jews Do for Christmas

I always find it interesting these days, especially in the supposedly non-sectarian United States, that the only day of the year that stores seem to be closed is Christmas Day -- a religious holiday! Veterans Day, Labor Day, Presidents' Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Columbus Day, even New Years Day -- indeed, secular and patriotic holidays, when we should be celebrating, marching in parades, flying our flags, and feeling proud to be American -- have become big shopping days!

So what's a Jew to do on Christmas? We love to shop, but can't. Legend has it that a traditional Jewish Christmas means Chinese food and a movie. And in most cases, this is true. Chinese restaurants are usually open, and many movie houses are too. Nowadays, of course, we can view movies at home on cable or DVD. What is this relationship between Jews and Chinese food anyway? Isn't it a little strange that Jewish people, who are not supposed to eat pork and shellfish, are large consumers of Chinese food? The best Chinese food can be found in Jewish neighborhoods, and the Chinese restaurant in my hometown closed during the eight days of Passover [when Jews wouldn't eat Chinese food -- don't ask!] I wasn't surprised when, during my tour of Israel in 1987, my tour group stopped for Chinese dinner in Haifa. And yes, it was delicious! How did this happen? On Sunday nights, family dinner in my house was Chinese food and Ed Sullivan. I even broke my Yom Kippur fast one year with Chinese food [very bad idea, by the way -- I'll spare you the details].

My grandparents, who kept a kosher home, ate Chinese food with us. In all fairness, they ordered vegetarian dishes, but these were not prepared in a kosher kitchen. And I think they preferred not to think about the fact that the vegetable chop suey they were eating, was prepared in the same wok as the pork fried rice and the lobster cantonese. When my dad started dating my mom, he introduced her to Chinese food. My mom had come from a home with Austrian immigrant parents, and had never tasted Chinese food until she met my dad. My dad had come from a religious kosher home, but the Navy opened his taste buds to "treyf" [non-kosher food]. In those days, the armed forces didn't care what kind of home you came from; you ate the food they served or starved. ] And about 15 years ago, there emerged a whole new phenomenon -- the kosher Chinese restaurant. In my neighborhood, it's called "Cho-Sen Garden", which is not a Chinese name at all; if you remove the hyphen, you "chosen". Get it? The "chosen" people? I know -- I groaned too when I figured it out.

So, in my family, our "Christmas envy" was recognized by getting together on Christmas Day and opening our Hanukkah gifts. They were wrapped in Hanukkah paper, and we had no tree, but we opened them on Christmas. My mom wouldn't even let us do what some of my Jewish friends did -- get a small Christmas tree, decorate it with Jewish ornaments, and call it a "Hanukkah bush". Often, Hanukkah's eight days intersected with Christmas, but often not. When I was little, we would go to my uncle Irving's house on Christmas Day. My uncle was married to an Irish-Catholic woman, their kids were raised Catholic, and they had a Christmas tree. Later in life, my sister only dated non-Jewish guys, and married my Italian-Catholic brother-in-law. My sister was excited to be able to legitimately have a Christmas tree. To this day, she and her husband celebrate Hanukkah and Christmas with their three kids, and display a Hanukkah menorah and a Christmas tree. I go there Christmas Day.

In the early years of my sister's marriage, however, they celebrated Christmas Day with the other [Italian] side of the family. I would go to their house on Christmas Eve, to exchange presents, and eat the traditional dinner, which included seven fishes or shellfish [not kosher of course, but neither are we]. Because of this, I could never join my single Jewish friends at the "Matzoh Ball", which is a huge Jewish singles party still held every Christmas Eve. And on Christmas Day, I found a Jew or two to share Chinese food and a movie. But one Christmas Day, I itched to do something different. I read in "Time Out New York" that Big Onion Walking Tours was repeating something they had done for the first time the previous year. They were conducting a Christmas Day tour of the Jewish Lower East Side, which was the landing place of most Jewish immigrants at the turn of the 20th century.

These days, the tenements, which housed the "huddled masses yearning to breathe free", have been renovated, and turned into million-dollar condos. But the Christmas Day in the mid-90s when I took the tour, it was still a gritty area in transition, populated by our newer immigrants -- Hispanic families from the Dominican Republic and South America. I couldn't get anyone to join me, so I went bravely alone. As per the instructions in "Time Out", I met my tour at the Olympia Diner at the corner of Delancey and Essex Streets, by the Williamsburg Bridge. There must have been 200 people standing on that corner, all clutching their coffee in the blue and white paper cups which were typical of Greek diners -- decorated with Greek columns and the words "It's our pleasure to serve you".

I soon learned that the previous year, this tour had about 40 participants, so it was a total shock to Big Onion that about five times that many showed up this year. Big Onion Walking Tours has guides that are Columbia University Graduate History students. Since they need a guide for every 20 participants, they brought two guides, based on last years' attendance. But they should have known the power of "Time Out"! The guides who were there frantically made phone calls to rouse another 8 grad students out of bed to come lead groups. It would take a while for them to get to the Lower East Side from up at Columbia, more than 100 blocks away, and the subway was not running too often on Christmas Day. So there were huddled masses of more than 200 people freezing and lined up along Delancey Street for well over an hour. In the end, it was worth the wait, because the tour was great, even if my toes were numb at the end. At the time, they were still renovating the more-than-a-century-old Eldridge Street Synagogue, and there was no heat. But it was eerie to sit in the pews where most of our immigrant ancestors probably worshipped almost 100 years earlier.

But the greatest laugh, and the unforgettable moment came even before my tour started. We must have been a curious sight -- a crowd of 200+ people waiting all along Delancey Street. We were bundled up, but frozen. We were a crowd of all ages -- children, adults, elderly people --, all sizes, both genders, all clutching our Greek diner cups, and sipping our hot beverages. We weren't complaining either; we understood the situation, and were proud that so many people -- mostly Jews -- wanted to take this tour. We were the first thing people saw from their cars when they got off the Williamsburg Bridge into Manhattan -- early-morning empty streets, except for a throng of people crowded around two or three blocks. Suddenly a van full of people pulled up to the street, and the driver yelled out "Hey, what are all you people doing here?". A woman in our crowd yelled out her response, which summed it all up -- "We're a bunch of Jews with nothing to do on Christmas Day!"