We Didn't Want to Come East for Christmas

The Great Plotnik has received a posting from his Holiday and Hot Sauce Correspondent D. Conrad ("Con") Achy. As always, Achy isn't sure whether this is a story or a song. He's weird like that. Grab an eggnog. This'll take awhile.

Brooklyn Stories 2:

We Didn’t Want to Come East for Christmas

PART ONE

We wanted them to come West, like they always do.

We wanted them to come to us, not we go to them.

Like always. Like Christmas is supposed to be.

Christmas in San Francisco. A taco and a tree.

But on Christmas Eve we all walked up Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue

Which was jammed with nicely dressed people

Everyone’s small-looking head

Peeking out of large, furry collars

Gloves on hands and knitted scarves

Hats wrapped around necks and pulled over ears,

To keep away the biting wind

That roars crosstown

Seeking exposed skin

At 57^th Street, at 58^th Street, at 59^th Street

The moment you pass out of the lea

Of uptown skyscrapers, there, on the corner, see

The Arab street vendors

Smell the chestnuts roasting

Or sort of roasting

Actually they are propaning

Then you hunch down into your overcoat and without complaining

Hurry across the avenue

Diving this way and that

Through honking trucks and taxis. Who can believe

That anyone would drive

On Christmas Eve?

There’s Trump Tower, hurry in.

Take a break from this bone-cold wind.

Inside Trump Tower, a book kiosk.

Every book a Donald Trump book.

No one’s behind the counter.

You can only look.

The point is not to sell you

But remind you

That Trump has already defined you

Undermined you

He has written

Or at least had his hair put on the cover of

No less than fifteen books.

An idiot. With fifteen books.

They even have titles:

“How to Get Rich.”

“Think Like a Champion.”

Up an escalator

But we couldn’t get off.

The line to get into the Starbucks on the second floor

Of the Trump Tower

Was at least fifty people long.

What is going on here?

There’s a Starbucks on 56^th Street

And a Starbucks on 57^th Street

And a Starbucks probably mounted on a horse pulling a hansom cab through Central Park.

The horse is tireless.

He surely has wireless.

Why wait in line here?

Is 60 really the new 25?

Is The Donald the New Santa?

Warmed up, we sailed back outside.

I looked up: Wow.

Electronic snowflakes brilliantly illuminating Fifth Avenue

The famous store windows

At Bergdorf-Goodman’s

Which used to be William Vanderbilt’s mansion

One entire square block of Primo Manhattan

One house, 77 rooms

When the One Per Cent

Looked like today’s Ninety Nine

Old money makes Trump

Seem like a chump

When Bill Vanderbilt

And Jake Astor

Were Lord

And Master

These decorated store windows are gorgeous

Each with a different, other-worldy Christmas scene

The last was weird but the next is stranger

Lady Gaga

Jesus in a manger

Mary wearing Prada

Blue icicle erota

Chilled Spaniards

French dreamers

She takes his photo

With freezing fingers

And every single person on the broad avenue

Carrying one shopping bag, or maybe two

Filled with presents, white, red, green.

You cannot not notice

That everyone is smiling

Tacking slowly uptown

with the rest of the crowd

Moving on a leisurely broad reach

Along this world-famous Sea of Holiday Happy

All of us together

Before the gales freeze us

It’s jewels for Jesus.

Moses gets pajamas.

Somehow it all makes sense.

Everybody speaks happy.

At the Hotel Astor

A giant candy cane in front of the black-and-yellow awning

Next to which a red-jacketed Nutcracker

laughs merrily down at passing children.

Every child

Walking in front of the hotel

Looks up and giggles.

“Jeez,” I said to Staci.

“I know,” she said. “It’s magic.”

It is magic.

Christmas in New York is just Christmas-ier than Christmas in San Francisco.

The rest of the year we are the Big Bubble.

The west coast’s cosmopolitan, urban jewel

But in December

compared to The Big Apple

We are the Small Potato.

The Little Orange.

It makes sense to go East for Christmas. It’s cold.

Christmas should be cold.

I could have used a little snow, because I was set

With the alpaca gloves I brought back from Peru

And the knit cap I carried home from Punta Arenas, Chile

Plus the lined and hooded heavy coat Barb bought me

Which I first used for her Dad’s funeral

That icy morning years ago on the hill

Overlooking the railroad hollow in Kentucky.

The hard part, as always, in getting used to cold weather,

Is coming inside.

You endure that atomic flash

Of interior heating

Which requires you to rid yourself of all your cold weather gear

As fast as you can.

But don’t lose the gloves or the hat or the scarf

Because five minutes from now

You are going to have to put them all back on.

It’s Showtime.

It might be snow time.

PART TWO

It was fun to watch Dan and Isabella

Ice skate in Bryant Park

Surrounded by designer skyscrapers

A thousand holiday merrymakers

Four hours in a line so you can skate for free.

People are more patient than they used to be,

Apparently.

Drawn outside, by the zamboni smitten

You can work an I-Phone

With a woolen mitten.

It was fabulous to see our kids put on Christmas

With what seemed to be so little effort.

Did we teach them that?

Christ, I don’t think so.

It seems to me that I have traditionally

Been insane with worry about my family

Coming into town for the holiday

And me in my kerchief and Ma in her cap

Would immediately start our inevitable scrap

And all would pitch in to dive into the crap.

Dan and Staci and Bronnie, thanks,

Don’t seem to be bothering with any of that angst.

But then again, it was only us.

No, not true.

On Christmas Day there were friends dropping in

Dinner to get ready, and one person eats one thing

And not another

And the other eats the second thing

But not the first thing.

But everyone drinks whiskey and martinis.

They serve the dinner without a genie

Everyone enjoys telling jokes and playing music.

Isabella on conga. Jen on dumbek.

Dan plays guitar, Bron and Staci sing

What a snap, let freedom ring

Hanukkah intersected with Christmas this year…

Start spreading the news

Keep choosing the Jews

So from Providence Bron brought down the menorah

She’d made in preschool in Hollywood.

It’s made out of cardboard with hex nuts from the hardware store

To hold the candles.

From Dan’s dining room table in Brooklyn

We called my Mom in L.A.

As we got ready to light them. We’d insert the shamus

Strike the match

Then get Mom on the phone

So we could all sing the prayer together, in real time, while we lit the rest of the candles.

My Mom and I know the prayer.

But she forgets.

Bron sings with me when she's home. Tonight

We all sing it like we mean it.

Melody and light.

I fought my minimal Hebrew School education when I was a boy, hated it, Wanted nothing to do with it.

All I ever really learned was the prayers.

And yet

Baruch ataw adonai elohaynu melech haolam. Asher kidishanu b’mitzvosav vitzivanu l’hadlik ner shel Hanukkah.

Blessed art thou oh Lord our God, King of the Universe, who hath commanded us to light the Hanukkah lights.

That’s right, bubba, I’m the Patriarch now.

I could hear my Mom singing into the receiver

In her small but oh-so-familiar voice

Remembering the parts she could

And maybe she forgot that she was in LA

And we were in Brooklyn

Or who all was crowded around whose table

But she never forgot that wherever we were

We had remembered her too.

This was better than jewels.

Or pajamas.

I think Allah, Jesus and Moses

Would all approve

Of calling our Mamas.

And singing a prayer together.

Why don’t we start here?

Perhaps next year we’ll go up to Providence

To BZ’s house. If all goes according to plan and she

Does receive her Ph.D

In May of Two Thousand One and Three

Next Christmas would be her last in Rhode Island.

Maybe we’ll do that.

Or maybe we’ll go back to Brooklyn

Or maybe they’ll all come West like they

Always have done before.

Things have changed now.

It’s a competition.

A small, informal battle

Whose resort? Whose kitchen?

But the tacos are here

At 24^th and Mission.

One thing is for certain

Barb and I have a beautiful family

All of whom will move mountains in their lifetimes.

Our gorgeous grandchild will not move the mountain

She’ll give the orders

And the mountain will move itself.

It doesn’t matter where we have Christmas, does it?

Just so we do.