“You’re an idiot, Aaron.”
“Love you too, Miriam.” I didn’t. But being nice to your older sister on the first day of Hanukkah seemed like a good idea.
First Night of the eight days of Hanukkah, all Jews were mandated to celebrate. Actually, celebrate for all eight days, making it one of my favorite holidays. Miracles were handy that way. The Passover Pig Out, uh, Seder dinner, was another one where loads of good food was eaten to celebrate a miracle. In general, outside of the fast for Yom Kippur, The Day of Atonement, Jews were much more focused on feast. Probably because of all that famining we did in the times of the Torah.
Feasting was also good for the family; who’d have thought that Gloucester, Massachusetts—a decidedly Italian and Portuguese town on the North Shore—would rock a Jewish deli and bakery for over a century.
Also, Miriam is dangerous in an evil-older-sister way, making cautious civility a functional strategy.
After I’d teased her about looking so different from the rest of us—saying maybe ten or twenty times too often that she looked like some demented denizen of Hell had pulled a fast one on Mom—she’d filled my pillowcase with whipped cream…liberally mixed with electric-pink dye.
When I’d plunged into bed that night, it had burst forth and splattered all over my room like a goopy shotgun blast. Everything it touched was stained hot pink: my clothes (which might have been all over the floor), my homework, my rug. My posters, the less said about my taste in under-clad female pop singers at that age…maybe it was high time they were ruined.
I’ve long since gotten my own apartment but Miriam had somehow arranged to have Mom guilt trip me into taking that rug with me. We’re Jewish, guilt works. Jewish-mother-guilt is like an undeniable superpower even Superman could only wish for.
I still live with that rug; so sue me.
Over time, the bright pink polka-dots have faded from Madonna “Material Girl” hot-pink to Barbie pastel-pink. Since the movie, I’ll admit that having cause to daydream about Margot Robbie knocking on the apartment door some day isn’t an all-bad thing.
But I knew why Miriam—too tall and too much lush hair to be a proper Schwartzman—was calling me an idiot this time.
For this first night of Hanukkah, we gathered about the same table that we’d grown up around. Mom and Dad, Uncle Max who’s at least half as funny as he thinks he is, Aunt Max (short for Maxine), my two girl cousins (who at least look like they belong to the family, though I now keep my mouth shut on that point), and Grandma (on Dad’s side).
She’d given me a Hanukkah gift on First Night. We aren’t really a gift-during-Hanukkah kind of family. Dad may call our Christmas tree a Hanukkah bush, but he’s not fooling anybody; he’s into it as much as the rest of us.
No, for us Hanukkah is about fried potato latkes, cheese and blueberry blintzes drowned in sour cream, and smoked salmon on fresh-made sourdough bagels. It’s about Mom putting Peter, Paul, and Mary’s A Holiday Celebration album on because it had the “Light One Candle” song about Hanukkah in among all the Christmas carols. Mom isn’t retro, it’s Grandma’s vinyl and she’s never embraced CD never mind digital. We don’t try to make the music ourselves as we are the Family Schwartzman-can’t-carry-a-tune-for-crap non-singers and none of us, not even Miriam, look the least like Julie Andrews.
The most serious endeavor for us other than the lighting of the candles and a bit of feasting was playing the Dreidel game for gelt, gold-foil-wrapped chocolate coins. Ganz, halb, nischt, schict, the four sides of the spinning top, deciding who gets and who gives gelt. One year I’d spent hours trying to figure out how to load a Dreidel to always land showing ganz so that I could take all the gelt during my turn. But Miriam figured it out, switched our Dreidels when I wasn’t watching, and cleaned me out. Worse, she shared her winnings with our cousins, but not me.
Anyway, our household? Not big on Hanukkah gifts.
But Grandma had given me a present—and only me. There are a few advantages to being the only male of my generation on either side of the house. First-born male has a certain gravitas in a Jewish household, especially to someone as traditional as Grandma, which I totally bought into because of how much it irritated Miriam.
