Soup's On!

Are you enjoying this holiday season, or are you feeling the stress? If you are having a week like mine, you are probably doing a bit of both. Like many of my mixed-up friends, my family celebrates both Chanukah and Christmas. This year the lunar and Gregorian calendar collide, and the first night of Chanukah shares the spotlight with Christmas Eve. For those of us who overdo, it’s a level of excess unlike any we’ve seen in recent years.

I’m hosting my older sister and nephews this season and decided to make a nice Jewish dinner on Christmas Eve. I made two kinds of rugelach a few days ago rather than attempting homemade jelly donuts, also known as the difficult to pronounce sufganiyot. I even made my own applesauce to go with the potato latkes that will grace my table.

All we really want to eat is latkes. They are crisp and greasy and salty and truly delightful. They also sit in your gut, daring you to digest them, while you wonder why we celebrate a minor Jewish holiday by eating the equivalent of a Waffle House side dish. We have to have something else to balance out those potato pancakes, and I thought matzoh ball soup and a salad might help move things along.

I like to make my own stock. I don’t do anything unusual. I am not browning fatty backs and wings to bring out the flavor. I do not roast my onions and carrots to a delicious caramel before adding them. I just kick it old school with my chicken, veggies, seasonings, and water and let the whole pot simmer away on the stove.

With all the extra food in the house for the double holiday, I didn’t have room in my refrigerator for a big stock pot. I do have an extra fridge in the garage that is usually stocked with beer and old sodas that no one wants to drink. When we have company or holiday meals, our food overflow goes in the outside fridge. I had my husband rearrange his odd assortment of beer to make room for my stock pot and, interestingly enough, a honey baked ham that I plan to serve alongside the turkey breast for Christmas dinner. We don’t keep kosher, but we are also not big ham fans. Chances are good that thing is going to see the trash can Christmas night, minus a slice or two.

After the stock finished cooking, I let it cool for a little while before removing the chicken and pouring the broth through a strainer to remove the tired, old veggies that gave their all to the cause. With the stock safely transferred to another pot, it was ready to go in the outside fridge. I carefully lifted the pot of hot chicken stock and carried it towards the garage door. My daughter, S, held the door for me and scurried down the short flight of brick stairs to open the fridge door.

I took a step or two, and my heel caught on the third step.

Have you ever noticed that when you fall, you feel like it happens in slow motion? I lost my balance and fell back oh so slowly, trying to figure out a way to break my fall without spilling the stock on my daughter or myself. Make no mistake, that broth was simmering away mere minutes before. It was still plenty hot and ready to do some damage.

I fell down, landing hard on my butt and scraping my calf on the brick steps. I would like to say I didn’t spill a drop of soup, but I did. I spilled three drops. S was terrified, but honestly, other than the scratch on my leg, I was fine. I saved myself and the broth.

I perfected the art of falling with food when I was nine. A friend of mine had invited me to join her family on their boat, and we stopped at a sandy spot along a creek to play on rafts and have lunch. Her father grilled hot dogs for everyone, and I got it in my head that I wanted to eat mine in the small inflatable boat they had tied to the pontoon. It was moving gently with the current, and when I turned around to plop down in the middle, I fell, missing the little boat entirely. I landed hard in the water, in over my head. Somehow, I managed to save my hot dog, my right hand clutching it high in the air above the water’s surface.

That’s how I felt, holding that pot of hot broth. I was triumphant over tragedy, saving the soup, dodging what could have been not only an unfortunate loss of homemade stock, but also narrowly avoiding a severe burn a few days before Christmas Eve. It was a Christmas and Chanukah miracle, all wrapped into one clumsy fall.

Enjoy whatever holiday you want, however you choose to celebrate it. Maybe yours will cross over like mine, with a pot of matzoh ball soup right next to the honey baked ham in the fridge.

Gelt Guilt

You think shopping for Christmas is a pain the ass? Try finding Hanukkah stuff in a southern town. I have spent more than eight nights looking for small gifts worthy of the festival of lights, and let me tell, it’s slim pickings here in the Bible Belt. I didn’t bother looking at Wal-Mart, because, really, that’s just a step above Hobby Lobby.  But I’ve covered Target, Party City, my local Publix, and nothing. All anyone stocks is menorahs and blue and silver garland. How many menorahs does Target think we need?

In my house, the fun never stops during the holidays because we have one of those so-called interfaith families. My husband abhors organized religion but loves Santa and decorations and presents presents PRESENTS!! So we do both holidays.  Not only do I have to capture the motherfucking magic of Christmas, but I have to honor those hard fighting Maccabees by finding small ticket items that can be doled out over eight nights. Consider yourself lucky that Christmas is but one day a year.

My family refers to Hanukkah as the socks and underwear holiday. We save the good stuff for Christmas morning, and I never objected because the only thing I remember ever getting for Hanukkah when I was a kid were those knitted slipper socks with the pom poms on top. It was the only thing my grandmother knew how to knit, and she made a new pair for each of us every year, whether we needed them or not. She must have bought a lifetime supply of the ugliest, cheapest yarn 1968 had to offer, so all the slipper socks were in stomach-churning   color combinations like avocado green and corn yellow or rusty orange and camel beige.

Hanukkah presents were easier to find for my kids when they were little because they were happy with any small thing, a bag of chocolate coins or a new wooden dreidel. Hell, that’s two nights covered right there. I could always find a paint your own dreidel kit or foam menorah craft to make my preschoolers happy. My daughters are both in double digits now, however, and they need another dreidel like I needed new slipper socks.  They have fancy dreidels and laser light dreidels and dreidels that play music (the ubiquitous “I Have a Little Dreidel”) and even a stuffed dreidel made for infants.

They also have plenty of jewelry. We have chai's (this has nothing to do with tea) and Stars of David and evil eyes, bracelets and earrings and necklaces, enough to wear a different one for each night of Hanukkah. The only thing that would further identify them as Jewish would be a yellow star sewn on their clothing, but I don’t think we are quite there yet in America. Seriously, how what do Jewish parents with sons do? They don't really care about Jewish star earrings last I heard.

Today, I went in a party store and found a small Hanukkah section hidden amongst the paper plates. Much to my surprise, they had cheap plastic headbands with blue glitter dreidels perched atop springs; I think their technical name is "deely boppers." These headbands were a find. I haven’t seen them on any crap party or Jewish themed website for the past ten years. When I checked out with my boppers, I asked the cashier if that section was the extent of their Hanukkah goods, and she nodded yes. The two women behind me in line gave me a knowing look, then a fake sympathetic smile, the kind you give someone you think about letting out in traffic but then drive by anyway since the coast is not clear in the other lane, leaving them to wait for another nice person. Sorry, the look said. Sorry you’re Jewish.

So far, I’ve got the deely boppers, a couple of dreidels, menorah sunglasses, and a Hanukkah themed Mad Libs book. Four nights down. I figure I will fill in the rest with lip gloss and nail polish and other worthless crap that young teenaged girls enjoy. I contemplated Thanksgivukkah shirts, since this is the last time for 70,000 years that the first night of Hanukkah falls on Thanksgiving, but really, it's not like they will have an occasion to wear them again. 

I know it’s not about the gifts. It’s about the time spent together, making memories, sharing experiences….blah blah blah. It’s totally about the gifts. If Hanukkah didn’t have eight nights of gifts and an unfortunate proximity to Christmas, it would go the way of other lesser Jewish holidays, those we cannot pronounce and therefore forget altogether. Ever hear of Shavuot? Exactly.

I get that Christmas is a big deal, both religiously and commercially, but just once, I would love to see more than one end cap that’s devoted to Hanukkah, when the rest of the store has its halls decked in red and green.  Can you imagine going into a store to find the whole place shiny with silver and blue, klezmer music blasting over the intercom, the greasy smell of potato latkes wafting in the air? Glade and Febreze don't come in jelly donut smell, ever.

And how about a t-shirt or some dreidel socks or underwear or pajamas or something new instead of yet another box of candles and some paper plates?  Besides, I always buy my paper plates on sale after Hanukkah, because, let’s face it, who doesn’t love a bargain? 

I wonder what would happen if I just didn't get eight gifts, or, rather, sixteen, because there are two of them. We lose interest by the fifth night anyway. Wax drips all over the counter, a plastic dreidel or two forgotten on the floor, the stench of old grease in the air. I don't even like jelly donuts.

Why are Jewish holidays so long? Nobody has the attention span for an eight day holiday anymore. We don't even take vacations for that long.  We rewrite history all the time. Why not change that ancient miracle so I don't have to shop for as many gifts? Then we'd have a reason to buy a new menorah, with room for maybe just four or five candles. 

After we do that, maybe we can work on one spelling of Hanukkah. Enough with all the K's and C's and H's.