What'z it To Ya?

Tonight, TIAPOS is meeting at World Headquarters. We're having chili and other stuff too. Our assignment is to write something about the holidays. Here is what The Great Plotnik is going to read:

What'z it To Ya?

My family -- my mom, my brother, his wife and two kids -- don't get Christmas. It's really not their fault. We were What'z It To Ya Jews. If a gentile asked us if we were Jewish we said "What'z it to ya?"

Christmas was always "theirs" not "ours." They got Christmas, we got Hanukkah. My first memories of the season are of the pathetic little plastic net bags of tiny already half-melted chocolate coins, wrapped in gold foil, that were supposed to bring us joy. Or else I'd get a little wooden dreidle. A dreidle was good for four minutes of moderate entertainment with my runny-nosed cousin David.

On Hanukkah you were supposed to get one present a night for eight nights, but really if you got two you were lucky, and they were always the same.

Things changed when I was six and Harold, my new stepfather, came into our family. He had grown up in New Jersey in a very secular Jewish family. One of the very first things he did for my brother and me was to ask us whether we'd like to celebrate Hanukkah, and get meaningless nothings, or celebrate Christmas and get a ton of stuff all at once. Maybe I was only six, but this was the easiest decision I ever made. From then on we had Christmas.

One year Harold brought home a Christmas tree. It was tall and green and beautiful but we didn't really know what to do with it and we didn't have any ornaments. My mom moved the TV and put the tree in the corner of the living room and it sat there making the house smell good until my grandparents called to say they were coming over.

They only lived twenty minutes away. Mom panicked and threw a sheet over the tree. When Gram and Gramp walked in they saw a large triangle-shaped sheet in the corner where the TV had been.

"Dis is...wat?" my Grandma said.

"This is nothing," Harold said, and that was that. It was also the last time we ever had a Christmas tree.

Ricky and I would get really excited about Christmas morning. When we woke up we'd run out to the living room and there the presents would be, on the fireplace hearth, waiting for us. Then we just had to wait for our parents to get out of bed. We'd put on our shorts and t-shirts and while away the time by watching the Green Bay Packers on TV playing football in the snow.

After we opened our presents we went outside and played touch football in the park with our friends. It was always sunny on Christmas Day in L.A. We'd laugh about all the fools whose football fields would be covered with ice until April.

So Christmas was joyful, but it was about getting presents and that was that. There was no pre-Christmas excitement, only one tree (one time), of course no snow, no Christmas stories and certainly no Jesus. To Jews, Jesus is a little like Tinker Belle or the Tooth Fairy, someone you don't take too seriously and wouldn't think about at all if he didn't have this really cool holiday named after him.

Most of our cousins kept celebrating Hanukkah. Ricky and I thought this was hysterical. "So, David, what did you get for Hanukkah this year?" we'd say. "Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha."

Plus, I knew that celebrating Christmas made it easier for me to go back to school in January. When the tough Mexican kids asked us: "So what did you get for Christmas?" I could have an answer. When they asked my friend Ricky Rosenberg what he got for Christmas, he said "We don't celebrate Christmas."

"You don'...wha-a-a?" And then they shouted "You Kill Jesus!" and, in the true spirit of evangelical Christianity, chased Ricky around the school, trying to pull his pants down to smear lipstick on his butt.

I always got at least one new shirt for Christmas and I made sure I wore it the first day back. So when Clyde Ramirez asked me what I got for Christmas, I smiled proudly and said: "Oh, lots of stuff. Like this cool shirt."

If I could have added "Praise Jesus" I would have. But that would have required there to be black people in our part of L.A. and there weren't any. We had Mexicans in the flats, Jews in the hills, and we lived in the middle, living in our totally integrated neighborhood where everybody but us went to the same synagogue.

We seldom set foot in Temple Beth Whatever, though to this day my mother thinks we went to services every Friday night. The older she gets, the Jewier we were.

My parents were the children of immigrants who wanted to leave the old country behind, which included being done with taking out an advertisement with your face and clothing that you are Jewish. In America, my grandparents became Americans.

Not that they didn't continue being Jews. Hitler was not a distant memory then, like he is now, and my grandparents also remembered the Czar and any number of local tyrants. So they might have been What'z it To Ya Jews, but they were Jewish to the core.

And so is my mom. She married a Jew, in fact she married three of them, and my brother married one too. So it stands to reason that Mom and Ricky would have no idea what Christmas is really all about.

I alone was smart enough to branch out. My wife grew up in full-bore Christmas country, and right before we got married I got to spend one very memorable Christmas with the Jenkins family of Plandome, Long Island.

It snowed on Christmas Eve that year, fresh, white, beautiful snow. We rode sleds. We threw snowballs. We ate formal meals with rings for the napkins. When I saw a little round piece of polished wood with a napkin inside it I had no idea what it was for. I did know what to do with Barb's mom Mildred's incredible corn pudding, though.

Mildred liked me, but did not particularly know what to make of me, since although I was living with her daughter it was not something she was going to acknowledge.

Or maybe she did. That year my future mother-in-law gave me a jar of Vaseline for Christmas. "This is for your tools," she said.

We had so much fun. Neighbors and friends of the Jenkins family popped in all day long. There were lots of cocktails and people wearing sweaters and ties and Christmas music and Christmas cookies and Christmas candy and Christmas fruit cake and everyone wished me a very Merry Christmas and I wished them one back.

At that point, I was still one of the few Jews who hadn't written a Christmas song yet.

Christmas in Plandome in 1969 was the first real Christmas I ever saw, and I will never forget it, but it was the only one. Barb's mom died just before Thanksgiving the following year and I don't even remember what happened on that Christmas a month later. Her father remarried soon thereafter, and moved the family to Atlanta, Georgia, and Barb and I had gotten married too. Our lives moved on just as Grandpa Joe's did.

Here is what I remember the most: the feeling of Christmas at the Jenkins house was certainly about Peace on Earth and Good Will to Men, and it was probably in some way tied in with being members of the Congregational Church, and no doubt there were other issues percolating under the surface I never picked up on. Barb's brother Joey was in Vietnam, for example, and to the family I must have looked like a dangerous scraggly-headed proposition for their daughter.

But for me Christmas that year was about Barb's mom, and seeing her in little ways in all three of her children. It was about feeling happy with my life, with my girl friend and her wonderful sister, with the parents I knew I'd win over eventually, and with a tradition that was brand new to me. It became a lot more than getting presents and playing football. It's about coming home to the belly of the world, where your heart has always been.