First off, I wanted to thank all our awesome Crappers for their words of encouragement and their help. One of the most awesome things about all of you is that you don't need a special holiday season to give of yourselves. You give of yourselves every single day. From hilarious comments on the blog all the way to making sure lost and abandoned pets are cared for.
Of course, that got me thinking about the holiday season. The fun of decorating, the food, giving gifts, um...the food...I mentioned decorating, right? Okay, let's include "getting gifts". Getting gifts is fun, but not always. There's often an ugly sweater lurking under the Xmas tree, and, let's face it, the stocking stuffers can be weird. I had an ex-boyfriend whose parents used to put cans of soup in his stocking. I, personally, will never forget when my sister gave me cocktail swizzle sticks.
However, it's not Christmas yet. It's actually the season of Hanukkah, in which people remember how the Maccabees kept their temple candles lit for 8 nights, when they only had enough oil for one. Did you know that part of the celebration is eating oily food? It's true! Donuts, latkes, and fast food for everyone! Along with 8 days of gift giving! Let's rifle through Hanukkah Harry's pockets and see what he brought the kids for the first 3 days of Hanukkah:
On The First Night of Hanukkah, Hanukkah Harry Brought To Me:
Sure, it seems cute...at first. What no one knows is that Sammy is an Australian Funnel Web spider and will kill everyone in the house before Hanukkah is over! (Do arachnids keep kosher? I mean, technically flies are neither pork nor shellfish, so...)
On The Second Night of Hanukkah, Hanukkah Harry brought to me:
Awesome! Hanukkah Hacky Sacks for the Hebrew Hippie in your family!
On The Third Day of Hanukkah, Hanukkah Harry brought to me:
Color Your own Hanukkah Banner, you Macher! What? Our traditional Hanukkah Banners aren't good enough for you?!
So there you have it: Three gifts for the first three nights of the season. Are they meaningful and appropriate? What do I know, I'm a Shiksa! (Which, as I discovered, means I'm a Gentile chick, and not the Other Leading Brand of safety razor.)
Happy Hanukkah everyone!
4 comments:
My mom once put stockings up with all sorts of weird little gifts... the one I best remember is that my brother got a can of deodorant. Boy, was he ever teased for that! I got travel-size shampoo. I think Mom shopped in the toiletries aisle that year.
And of course, after you start playing hacky sack, your mom has to say, "What, you didn't like the book?"
In re: Judaeo-Gentile relations in these United States, my favorite memory vignette, as a secular goy living most of my life in the NY Metro suburbs and thus having scads of Jewish pals all thru grammar school, high school and college, is of the day our family had just returned from buying a large Christmas tree, which was tied to the roof of the station wagon.
We had a friend with us, and en route back home my parents decided to show the friend the ritzy new Reform temple that had been built hearby. It was a quiet Sunday afternoon and no one seemed to be around as we tooled up the tree-lined drive to the building, and did a slow U-turn in the parking lot so we could dig on the architecture. Just as we wee turning to go, a woman in a sedan came up the driveway, who stared out her window at us in a sort of ransfixed.surmise "Uh-oh," said my dad. "The barbarians are invading."
ANNTI said...
Wow. I thought that my Jewish friends were exaggerating when they bemoaned the 8 days of lame-assed gifts.
Apparently not.
Oy.
But then, back in the '70s, depending upon her psychotropic drugs of the week, teh Fallen Uterus could stuff stockings with anything from wind-up bathrub toys to oranges & walnuts, to one year when we all got TUBE SOCKS in our stockings. The Wonder Woman vinyl-bottomed socks of 3 years previous were sadly missed... and no, I never got the Underoos, they never went bigger than a child's 6, not even a 6X. And as I was 8"- a foot taller than everyone my age, you can imagine the frustration-bordering-upon-psychotic rage that came out of the Fallen Uterus, who was a fucking ELF.
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