To be truthful, I haven’t cooked a Christmas dinner since 1994. That’s the year I boiled lobsters for my Jewish husband. Sam, being Sam, took one look at those red, naked crustaceans un-garnished on a white platter, leaking and started to laugh. Lobster is a forbidden food in Judaism – it’s traif — unkosher. I knew that but I was in a cranky, ba-hum-bug mood. Besides he loves lobster. So he poured us both a glass of wine and said a toast to his ‘lovely, goyim wife’. Then he melted butter, cut up a lemon and with a sly look, suggested that I ought to put something green around the lobsters like parsley or holly. ‘You know’ he said ‘for that festive, Christmas spirit.’ Sam got me to smile despite that fact I was in a snit and in the midst of an emotional turmoil. He also knew that those boiled bodies were really the sacrificial incarnation of my disappointment about how we were celebrating or, as it seemed to me, the un-celebrating of Christmas.
 
While we ate dinner — cracking shells, breaking claws and dipping into melted butter – we agreed to approach the holiday more gently the next time around. I’d been blind-sided by how much I missed the Christmas’s of my youth, even though rationally, I was pretty sure that they weren’t as perfect as I remembered them. Especially that beef and kidney stew my mom used to make.
 
Growing up, we had a tree with too much tinsel and enough colored lights that I could hide under. Christmas morning my mom set a beautiful breakfast table with the advent wreath, candles and silverware and my family would open presents during the feast. We had fresh orange juice, soft boiled eggs, English muffins, the grapefruits that someone always sent us, sausage, cheese, chocolate and champagne. Sam on the other hand, grew up visiting his friend’s houses — eating their leftovers, playing with their train sets and then going home to light the menorah. Hanukkah wasn’t even that big a deal to his family.
 
After our lobster dinner, Sam cleaned up the empty shells and did the dishes while I went to go cry myself to sleep for that one last self-indulgent gasp of melancholic nostalgia. Once I got that out of my system, I wept again with the absolute relief that that Christmas was finally over.
 
Since then we’ve tried to make sense out of this holiday in a quiet, subdued kind of a way. We attempt to keep the frenzied consumerism and that conspicuous consumption down to a low roar for our kids and sometimes we travel to far away places to avoid it. Over the years we’ve incorporated different artifacts and symbols from Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa. We’ve advent calendars and menorahs. The boys play dreidl and teach me how to say the blessing while lighting the Hanukkah candles. Sam puts up a tree and the cats try their best to tear it down. We tell stories, bake cookies, rent movies, go sledding and the boys go to their friends’ houses to play with all their new stuff. And what do we have for Christmas dinner? Not lobster. But something that everyone loves and makes good leftovers — Chinese take-out.

originally broadcast December 15, 2004