Alef: The NEXT Conversation

Tropicana Christmas

By Lucy Gillespie

When I was a kid, I had a tutor to help me prepare for Secondary School.  She had me write a creative piece on Christmas and so I wrote about Christmas in England – the one I had read about in Enid Blyton books, and had seen suggested by intricate shop windows.  My mum happened to be in the kitchen when I read it, and she laughed out loud.  “What the hell do you know about Christmas?” she asked.  Even Mrs. Gilby agreed that the piece was not up to my usual scratch.

“Nothing,” was my answer.  I knew absolutely nothing about Christmas.

Going home to see my mother’s family was part of the contract when my parents moved to England.  Three weeks in Florida from December 6th until December 31st, or divorce.  Every year, the great battle of the Maccabees was reenacted in my house as my mother fought tooth and nail against our Elementary School for a much, much higher purpose than Education.  Sicknesses were faked, high airline ticket prices were invoked – anything to get us onto that plane and into the steamy Florida air, where Blue and Silver joined Red and Green upon the walls, and where “Happy Holidays” had long since won out over “Merry Christmas.”  The three of us called her “mum,” and she had gotten used to it, but singing Christmas Carols was far, far beyond the line.

Our Channukah feasts were America’s feasts – the grand, spic-and-span carvery table of the Sizzler, and it’s breakfast equivalent, Shoney’s.  And it simply wouldn’t be the holidays without a soft mint and a toothpick to cap up our mid-afternoon dinner, then falling asleep, stretched out in my grandparent’s Cadillac on the drive home. Pulling into the drive of Galt Towers, we (the cousins) would alight sleepily in the Florida air as winds of hurricane-capability splayed and tossed the palm trees.

On Christmas Day, when the Flea Markets and Dollar Stores were closed, my grandmother would take us to the movie theatre at 10am, and we would sneak around from screen to screen to concession stand and back to screen.  Then, charged with popular culture, we would head back out to the great Churches of Retail – for we were truly in the Jerusalem, the Bethlehem, the Mecca of beloved stuff – and buy sneakers emblazoned with Aladdin or The Lion King motifs.  When we got back to England, they would be the talk of the playground.  We saw those films months before anyone else, and we had the merchandise to prove it.

In my mid-teens, the Florida trips dwindled, and my dad showed his true colors one year, unloading a plastic tree in a box from the car after a trip to Costco.  Since then, we’ve carried out the traditional routine – presents, stockings, Mince Pies.  But however hard we try to adapt to this beast called “Christmas Spirit,” the magic is gone.  I can’t help but think that the big draw to a stereotypical Christmas is the anticipation, and the sense that you’re getting something you need – spirituality and presents alike!  Thanks to my mother, what I need to make my year complete is that trip to the travel agent in June, three weeks to pack my suitcase and perfect my American accent, and eighteen hours of five large individuals at boiling point in airports before the sweet, sweet relief of a beach-front condo.  I still dream about those buffets, the Swap Shop Flea Market and its Three-Ring Circus, the pile of presents on my grandmother’s wraparound sofa, half-hazardly covered in a sheet to protect them from the vying fingers of all of the cousins.  Tables a mile-wide with relatives that look like me, and who know what I know -  that it’s Channukah and Channukah alone that has brought us together.

Christmas, frankly, will never hold a candle to that.

Read more from Lucy here.

Photo by Arthur Smokes, licensed under Creative Commons.

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