A Festivus for the Rest of Us

Just returned from Christmas Day at my family's ancestral home in Irvine, California. After venturing to my former house late-night Christmas Eve after a night spent with friends in Long Beach, I had the odd experience this morning of arising in my room from high school. The whole room looks different now, even the bed has changed, so it's not actually my room any more. It's a room in which I happened to once sleep.

My parents always request that I spend the maximum possible holiday-centered time around the house, even though I only live 45 minutes away and this particular holiday isn't actually included in our official religion. I mean, in my family, we don't even celebrate the holidays that form the backbone of our religion...I haven't been inside a synagogue since Grunge was happening. So it just seems a little silly that my presence is required on the holidays we all basically admit to disliking.

I'm also not a big fan of Christmas because I have no money, so though occasionally people give me gifts, I can't actually afford to gift them anything back, unless they consider my company itself to be a gift. (Thankfully, my grandparents seem to actually feel this way). By the way, if you just read that paragraph, and thought to yourself, "He should just make them something himself, from the heart, to show them how much he cares about them," congratulations on being a total cheesy poof.

Christmas in America isn't about Jesus or family or friends or the Spirit of Giving or Goodwill Toward Men. It's about shopping. That much should be very clear at this point. And I don't even mean that in a "oh, it should be about your love of The Lord" or anything...Because who needs that shit?...I just mean, we should stop pretending it's about anything other than shopping, reflect on how much we all like shopping, invite non-Christians (well, maybe not Muslims) to join the mad end-of-year Festival of Shopping and stop trying to move it back to all this Jesus-manger-nativity crap.

When Bill O'Reilly kept going on and on about how "they" were trying to kill Christmas...what did he talk about? People stealing the Baby Jesus from manger scenes? People defacing churches on Dec. 24th or defecating in the middle of Christmas Tree lots? No, it was how sales people greet you at the mall. That's what he referenced, because that's what Christmas means to most Americans - a few extra trips to the mall! So we can buy stuff! Stuff for which we, nor anyone else we know, could possibly ever find any use, like little ceramic ornaments featuring Santa Claus in a Hawaiian shirt, sunglasses and board shorts or angels giving one another high fives!

But I got off on a tangent. The point was, I have to go celebrate Christmas with my family, a family intent on buying me things, despite the fact that we are all Jews and that, short of the gift of a few spare Tic Tacs, I won't be able to give anyone anything. (Okay, this isn't totally true. I got my brother and his actual Christian Christmas-celebrating girlfriend some DVD's.)

I was getting to a description of the evening itself. First, my father and I watched Get Shorty on DVD, a movie that has aged spectacularly well, I must say. I still found it funny, despite having already seen it a few times before. My dad is just getting over a wicked case of conjunctivitis, a disease that makes your eyes extremely disgusting. I thought that was the disease you get from raw chicken, but apparently I'm thinking of another -ivitis, because my dad doesn't really handle raw chicken all that much to my knowledge. Although now that I think about it, he does work in Koreatown, a place that strikes me as having a far higher-than-average ratio of raw-chickens-to-humans, so you never know...

Later on, my parents, my mother's parents, my brother, his girlfriend and a family friend (who has just joined the Coast Guard!) all gathered to eat some homemade Italian food and exchange presents. Considering I showed up with only the DVD's for my brother and his lady friend, I made out pretty well. A box with some new clothes included much-needed socks and underwear. All of my socks are, like, jet black on the bottom because the carpet in our apartment is dirtier than Tom Sizemore's DVD collection.

I also came away with Kurt Vonnegut's new collection of essays, "A Man Without a Country," some gift certificates to Pacific Theaters, a case of Heineken, some actual U.S. currency and enough leftover food to stock the Lunch Buffet at the Bellaggio. Not a bad haul.

After dinner, my grandmother was prompted to tell some of her infamous stories. I've heard most of these stories before, at family get-togethers. Most of them have passed beyond humorous anecdotes and into family legend, and some of the highlights were hauled out of the archives for this particular event.

It struck me tonight, more than before, that my grandmother's narratives are less like stories and more like stand-up comedy. She's told them to so many audiences at this point (and there's always someone new around) that, like Chris Rock or George Carlin, she has the timing down cold. My brother and I have heard the one about her wig being caught in an opening umbrella about 100 times, and it's still funny.

Tonight, we heard a brand-new, hilarious story. Once, my grandparents were enjoying coffee and dessert in a restaurant. My grandfather started to eat his slice of watermelon with a spoon. This very much upset my grandmother for some reason, as she feels the proper way to enjoy a slice of watermelon is with a knife and fork.

"Bill," she said, "if you take one more bite of that watermelon with a spoon, I'll throw my coffee cream right in your face."

"You wouldn't dare," responded my grandfather.

Now, this is not the right thing to say to my grandmother. "You wouldn't dare." I would never say that to her. I know better. My grandfather, unfortunately, was apparently feeling saucy.

"What did you say," my grandmother responded?

"I said you wouldn't dare..." he replied.

So, of course, she threw the cream in his face, splatting all of him and his glasses. And, naturally, he threw his coffee cream right back in her face.

And everyone in the restaurant turned around to see what the insane couple covered in cream would do next.

You have to understand, when she tells this story, my grandmother acts it out, gets really into it. The performance tonight was fall-down funny. We were hysterical. And I just reflected on how similar it was to professional stand-up comedy, and how much of an impact it made on me having these kind of shenanigans going on all around me from a young, formative age.