Still and truly a lonely jew at Christmas

I posted the song last year, and it’s funny and all, but it’s also true. I get very lonely at Christmas.

More recently I wrote a bit about my conflicts over being Jewish and wanting the Christian thing. But I mostly think of that as something from my childhood. Until Christmas.

The whole world stops. It does. You can feel it. I guess that for the people who participate it varies as much as any other experience does, so for some it’s about noise and presents and food and for some it’s about church and family and love. And all the unlimited variations on those and other themes that present themselves. And for those who don’t (participate in it), for all the reasons we don’t, for some it’s about despair or indignance or maybe for some it’s really just about Tuesday. But you have to spend a long time getting good at really ignoring it before that happens, at least in my opinion.

I was raised Jewish. Not Hanukkah-bush Jewish (that’s too assimilating for mom), just menorah-Jewish. And I loved all the Jewish stuff and the holidays and all of it. But I was hungry for the other.

I had a taste of Christmas through my stepmother; we would, some years, go to her mother’s in Concord, Mass., where you couldn’t have gotten a more Christmasy Christmas. Stockings and snow and all that stuff. (No carols. I don’t remember carols, but maybe I just don’t remember.)

In my 20’s, I became pagan. Wiccan. And discovered Yule. Which gave me all kinds of permission to decorate a tree and stuff.

For a few years there were trees. Pretty! But the conflict remained. And remains to this day. I’m also single, which makes it hard to want to do any of it, so the past few years, no tree or lights or shiny balls. (Shiny!)

(Well, one little purple feather tree with peacock feathers on my desk at work. I mean, the thing screamed ROBERTA.)

When I participate, it feels a bit false and also a bit like I’m selling out. When I don’t, I feel lonely. Christmas eve is distinctly joyless for me. Not just sans joy, I mean, joy sucking. Sucks it right out of me. I cannot help but notice that most of the world (at least it feels like most of the world) is off doing magical things that I have no part in. For me it’s stay home and eat something and sip on some nog and flip around until I can no longer avoid watching It’s a Wonderful Life until I finally fall asleep.

The fact that Joe is part of the ‘most of the world’ was not supposed to bother me this year, but did. The fact that he has not contacted me for like a week because he is too busy doing his holiday thing and doesn’t consider me enough when I’m not doing the reaching out to maybe wonder how I’m doing, and I don’t even know where he is (as in, geographically, because he travels but I’m so out of the loop I have no idea when he’s heading, or most likely, has headed, home) should not be getting me down and yet it does. Though when I read that back it does make sense… regardless of what the limitations are of this non-relationship, it’s not supposed to feel this isolating.

So yeah the lonely Jew thing mingles on up with the lonely single girl thing and tries to crush me.

I’m not crushed. And I’m not really all that lonely. But it is all worth writing down.

What I’d like in a man, it turns out, is one who (well, one who loves me more than anything and can’t stand the thought of living without me and I feel the same way and he’s a really great guy and he has an income but besides all that) I can share some Christmas or Yule with and not feel guilty. Because if it’s part of the partnership I won’t.

Because I don’t see me finding much peace on this topic on my own. It’s been 40-ish years of trying.

Oh, and now that I’ve re-read the meme from that entry last year, it’s really interesting how different this year was than how I thought it might be. So I will be repeating that exercise soon.