Ghosts of Christmas Past, Redux

It seemed clever but familiar to me, to call this post something like "Ghosts of Christmas Past." I was correct, at least about the familiar piece. Seven years ago, a year before my divorce, but my second year back into the world of Jewish Christmas, I used that exact title. I was still getting accustomed to the notion that I was no longer a part of something.

I suppose you never really get accustomed to not being a part of something when you were once a part of it, even when it's just a small something that comes and goes quickly, once a year. When I was little, my father used to drive us by the single block on Ocean Avenue (not to be confused with Ocean Parkway, my street) where a row of large single family homes (unusual in and of itself on a main drag in Brooklyn) was lit up like, well, a Christmas tree. An essential part of our holiday tradition, I suppose, along with Chinese food and a movie. In my mind, those houses are still lit up, the same families still inside.

Back in those days, it seemed that very little was expected of me except that I go to an Ivy League school and one day marry a Jew. In that order. It seemed reasonable, just as it seemed reasonable that I would have the attention span or the drive to meet my own expectations of myself and eventually go to medical school and become a doctor and go into practice somewhere on Park Avenue with my brother, who really would have liked to be an architect but there is, after all, a hierarchy of expectations and some are simply not optional.  He is a doctor.

So I married a Gentile, which never struck me as a viable option but somehow I got away with it and my mother eventually pulled her head out of the oven, if only because grandchildren (Jewish grandchildren, to boot) are irresistible. I had always known that the world wasn't really like where I grew up, where my father had to put us in the car and drive for 15 minutes so we could see a bunch of houses lit up like Christmas trees. But becoming a part of that world, that was different.

I enjoyed my years of celebrating Christmas, even the years when I would trudge off to Midnight Mass with my in-laws and choke on the incense and feel a little out of place when everybody was kneeling (I thought those things were foot rests). I liked being a part of their holiday, and the music was so pretty. I liked the last minute Christmas Eve day shopping. I liked ripping open presents I didn't need, and watching my kids do the same. I liked the smell of bacon frying in the morning, loved the taste even more. I liked my runs through the snowy and eerily quiet neighborhood. I liked sitting around in a food coma watching an endless loop of "A Christmas Story," the movie that has forever saved me from the agonizing pain of licking an icy cold flagpole.

It's been almost a decade since I was a part of Christmas, and a lifetime since I marveled at the lit up houses. The ghosts of all of it haunt me but still make me smile, as I struggle to create future ghosts.