Wednesday, December 28, 2011
The Holidays: Back With a Vengeance
Happy Goddamn Holidays, or, to be accommodating to our more sensitive readers, Happy Goddamn Holidays already. It’s now the middle of that intercelebratory interstice, where xmas has x-ited and NYE has yet to NYappear. I’m so burned out from butter-fried doughnuggets and cholesterol in cream sauce that I actually set up two menorahs last night and plumb forgot to light them. I’d better get to it tonight, because this is the last night of Chhhanukah and it’s bad luck to put away a menorah that’s fully locked and loaded. Something about eight days of the Burninator or something. Can’t be good, and it’ll be a full-ass year before I can do anything about it.
HENCE: my laser-like focus on holiday-ish cognition and re-cognition. I perceive, and perceive that I perceive. Which is not as easy as it sounds, in a house full of lego-flinging youth and healthy snorts of gifted scotch (of which the lego-flingers are happily being totally deprived). But I’ve forcibly cleared out a frayed scrap of time between cleaning up feasts and getting ready for flights, and I’m going to use it for a traditional “what I ate for lunch” blogpost. BECAUSE YOU DESERVE IT. And you can make of that what you will. Which I’m betting won’t be much. Which is as it should be.
The theme for this post, since my lunch was a fistful of re-heated pelmeni and hardly worth your attention, is “stuff that came back with a vengeance this festive season, but in a good way.” Because what says “festive season” more than “stuff you remember from way the hell back at the beginning of time, but that has been updated with the funkified twistedness that puts both the ‘new’ and ‘ill’ in ‘new millennium’”?
1. LATKES: I tried making them for a few years but wound up getting too fancy for my own pants. By straining out the potato starch and trying to reincorporate it, I just messed up everything and made my latkes heavy, chewy and unsatisfying. Not unlike myself. But this year I had latkes at the homes of two different friends, and both made pure, old-fashioned, perfectly fried latkes. Trader Joes also does a decent frozen version for those who seek ease and simplicity, but I personally ingested handmade examples that included both the old-school DutchMom version and the cutting-edge haute designer version. Both were almost identical to each other, and totally delectable. I can’t say enough about how good it made me feel to arrive at a holiday party and smell them frying while I was still coming up the front walk. Yay latkes. Really!
2. MENORAHS: I’ve been lighting menorahs even since I was old enough to whine about it till my dad let me take a crack at the giant silver chanukeah that has been in his family since the 19th century. And that’s been fine, really. But it’s gotten to the point that I’ve had to double my unctuous commemoration capacity , by acquiring yet a second menorah. My primary instrument, a sleek chrome model from my maternal grandparents’ household, has done me yeoman’s service for years, but now things have changed. Now, both my sons are old enough to whine about not getting a fair chance to ignite stuff after supper. Luckily, a colleague happened to attend a baseball game in July which was, for some reason, denominated “Jewish Cultural Night,” or “Grand Slam Ghetto,” or something like that, and he brought me back his free take-home bonus - a menorah that says “Go Giants” in Hebrew. Now both kids get to light menorahs, and for the first time since I was four, I’m barely involved in the actual flaminating process at all. It’s kind of weird, but fulfilling. The kids so love the flames. Maybe it should worry me but I’ll get to that next year.
3. SUPPER: It’s a holiday tradition to eat yourself stupid in honor of the virgin birth, or the triumphant Maccabees, or the returning fecundity of the post-solsticial period, or whatever. For exmas itself, I fried up some super tasty langostino tails (another TJ’s special) and tiny potatoes and some other damn stuff… and sure, there’s been green bean casserole and eggles and ice cream and all manner of tasty delights. But nothing - NOTHING - compares with the supper Mitch set down before us on the eve of equesmaz. The shrimp salad was fresh and tasty, and the desserts were plentiful and guest-hauled, so no complaints on any of that… but when it came time to eat the actual main course of the feast itself, he served short ribs, pressure cooked till they fell off the bones (not unlike myself), heaped in the center of a GODDAMNED HOME-MADE DONUT resting on a bed of fresh greens. Like the brisket pop-tart with horseradish frosting he made some years back, it was epic. As the meal before the roadtripping kings show up should be, don’t you think?
4. GENEROSITY: It’s always nice, but this year it’s been awe-inspiring. I know that people don’t give for the sheer reciprocity of receiving gifts of equivalent value, and I’m grateful for that because I could not possibly begin to be as openhanded and deep-pocketed as my many magnificent, munificent, magnanimous friends. I was totally blown away and I still am. What a massive haul this year. All that video, music, clothing and candy sort of makes the Maccabean War seem almost worth it.
5. PASSING THE TRADITIONS FORWARD: Apart from the candle-lighting, which honestly is just a socially-acceptable way to channel the arsonistic tendencies of all young people everywhere, the boys are actually singing along with the ignition-sanctifying prayers. And more than that, Z won’t stop warbling the same twisted version of “Jingle Bells” that I sang at his age, right down to the Joker getting away after the Batmobile broke its wheel. He even adds a verse about broken skis and waking up in the hospital with bullets in his head, that I think I recall the cool kids knowing in grade school but not sharing with me. If that’s not the holiday spirit, then I’ll need to distill some afresh. The classics, they never age!
6. FAMILY TOGETHERNESS: For nearly thirty years, which is in and of itself a time period that totally freaks me out if I can be perfectly frank about it, I’ve associated the birth of Jesus with some serious hard partying up in the Poconos with K’s family. For many years, on and off, we’ve been able to shlep across the country to hunker down in their accommodating digs and blow through several bottles of alcohol of diminishing quality (and subsequently have them blow through us). The year of Pisco and Pocheen was a watershed period, so to speak, but every year the Christmas shots flew thicker and faster than opening day of deer season - and let me assure you, that family lives in a region where deer are hunted with enthusiastic bloodthirstiness. But that thirst for cervine exsanguination has nothing on that which I’ve come to associate with celebrating Christmas. At other times of the year, everything is very much in an appropriate state of celebratory moderation, but on xmas all bets are off and all glassware is in serious use. However, this year we’re not going to the Poconos, and I couldn’t help but wonder, on that evening of mysteries, what the inlaws were up to and throwing down. But then I stopped wondering, when a series of texts bounced transcontinentally between our home and theirs, with attached photos and video. First, there they were on K’s phone, huddled around a table strewn with cups, fumbling with a broken noisemaking ornament. We reciprocated with a shot of me, doing a shot. They then sent back a video of three erstwhile wise men, bellowing “L’Chayim” as they struggled to keep each other upright. What a wonderful memory, and one I’d have totally missed last year when we didn’t have video-texting capacity. These modern contraptions, they keep us close from far enough away that I don’t have to even think about cleaning up afterwards. That’s the holiday spirit as applied to holiday spirits!
7. FUN-N-GAMES: My whole life I’ve cherished the holiday season for its message of peace, joy, and what-did-you-get-me-this-time. Sure, it was fun to decorate the house with garlands of origami dreyels and spray-snow stars of David on our windows (for reals!), but it was the ka-ching that really captured my attention. The kids have been young, so far, so it’s been fairly easy to keep them entranced in the same way I once had been, with three-quarters of a hot wheels car and a toy pig made out of a pink eraser and six thumbtacks. But now the kids are both in school, surrounded by others of their age and ilk, and they keep coming home with illicit knowledge of sophisticated playthings like transistor radios and rockemsockem robots. So finally, after (literally) two years of their cajoling and whining, we got them something electronic to play with. Not like when I was a kid and tried plugging my slinky into the wallsocket, either. This time it’s Wii. We’re starting with MarioKart and Sports, and I am delighted to say that I’m the second-best cybergolfer and electrobowler in the family. On the other hand, I’m the worst-but-one in all manner of hallucinogenic racing - and that only puts me ahead of J, who basically just runs his car into a wall repeatedly to see if he can burrow under it. We’re all starting to get shoulder and neck tension, and I’m having dreams about driving across mushrooms over creepy chasms. But since that’s so much like my day job at the office, it’s not a big deal. Congratulations, Wii: you got yourself another family. Now, what are you going to do with us? - because we clearly don’t know what to do with you.
Seven holiday revival items is probably enough for now, since I’ve been typing this damn list since early last night. Yes, it’s nearly the end of the last day of Chanukah, and I’ve had a busy time in the interim getting ready for a relaxing trip tomorrow up to the outer suburbs of one of our major northwestern metropoli, where a member of the extended family has settled down in a new house that has yet to be properly broken in. By which I mean, partied in, by me. I don’t intend to break anything, really. Not intentionally. Maybe I’ll need to update this on my return?
