Holiday Card Etiquette!

When you receive your first holiday card, you realize that you’re officially in the holiday season, or as I like to call it, “The Holiday card nightmare”.  As we enter the holidays, we also enter the awkward holiday greeting card etiquette.  The other day a long-time friend asked me if I get offended when people send me “Merry Christmas” cards, instead of the obvious Hanukkah cards.  Well – I replied, do you like getting “Happy Hanukkah” cards instead of “Merry Christmas” cards?  No need for explanation here…

If you don’t know someone well, I understand the general “Merry Christmas” statement, but if you know that person is anything but a Christian, why not order an extra set of plain “Happy Holiday” cards?  My friend’s reaction was, so am I supposed to order separate Hanukkah cards even though I don’t celebrate it?  No, I like getting the ones with Merry Christmas crossed out and Happy Hanukkah hand-written on them, right next to the baby Jesus and folk chanting: Our savior has been born, let’s rejoice!  But Happy Hanukkah anyway, you sad, sad Jew who’s missing out on all the saving and rejoicing that’s about to go on in here!

We (and by we, I mean the Jews) get that unless you live in Israel, are in the minority in this country and throughout the world, however that does not mean that all Gentiles have to completely ignore the fact that there are millions of people that don’t celebrate Christmas.  Anywhere you go its an automatic “Merry Christmas” greeting; from grocery stores to workplaces.  Do we (the Jews) go around saying “Happy Hanukkah” to strangers and store workers?  Can you imagine checking out at the local supermarket and just as you are about to leave announce: Happy Hanukkah to you and your family, may the spirit of Hanukkah light up your Menorah!  Actually, I have done that last week to a store clerk, just so I could beat her before the usual “Merry Christmas”.  You know the reaction I received?  A blank stare followed by an awkward “I am not Jewish” statement.  Doesn’t feel so good, store clerk, does it? Didn’t think so.

My parents on the other hand take a very different approach to all of this; they just accept and deal with it.  That’s their advice to me as well, just deal with it like all the Jews have dealt with it for thousands of years.  Then they proceed to remind me how we used to “deal” with it back home in Russia: walk home fast during the holidays, making sure that the Menorah you have wrapped in newspaper is tucked far enough into your coat that it doesn’t resemble anything “Jewish”, if anyone asks what you have under there simply reply with a “Oh, this?  It’s just a dead chicken I was able to find at the store on Minskaya and Leningradskaya street.  You might want to hurry, I heard they were about to run out of them!”  Then you proceed to distract the gentile with something as you reposition the Menorah and walk briskly towards home.  Usually the whole ‘they-are-selling-chickens’ routine gets people distracted enough to make them forget they might be talking to a Jew, since chicken was comparable to a diamond in those days.  Another way how the Jews have been so-called dealing with it, mainly in the former Soviet Union is to pretend they are not Jewish or have ever been one.  It’s a very common practice, which many families still participate in to this day…  Our family however did not, only for the simple fact that there was no getting around ‘looking Jewish’ as my Father put it.

As much as I appreciate my parents input on how to deal with the holidays, they very well know I am not the one to ‘just deal’ with anything.  My approach is more of a head-on-attack kind of way, which usually means pissing off a lot of neighbors, friends, strangers and parents in the schools that my kids belong to…  People seem to forget that World War 2 started because people chose to ignore, and deal with the way things were changing in Europe.  Even the Jews went along with what they were told to do by the Nazis, only because they were afraid to rock the boat, and in a way they didn’t want to think that something so awful would ever be allowed to happen to them.  But it did happen, and in a way because people ‘just went along’ with every change that was happening.  That’s part of the reason I refuse to go along with this whole ‘do as you are told, say Merry Christmas and blend in’ routine.  Sorry, but if you send me a Christmas card with baby Jesus on it, you bet I am sending back a Hanukkah card that may say something like this:

” Happy Hannukkah, let’s celebrate our people’s battle from oppression and genocide, after the Greek-Syrians destroyed our Temple for the second time, massacring thousands of Jews, desecrating the city’s holy Second Temple by erecting an altar to Zeus and sacrificing pigs within its sacred walls, making the Jewish people pray to the Greek Gods and outlawing Judaism.  But thanks to Judah Macabbee and his brave army of twelve little Jews (all proudly under 5 feet 4 inches), who drove the Greek army (of 1,000 mind you) and finally rebuild the Temple. Let’s celebrate the many failed attempts of trying to wipe out the whole species of Jews – 5772 years later, somehow we are still here!  Happy Hanukkah!  We are still here, Biatches!  Not going anywhere, so stop trying!”

Well, maybe I’d leave out the ‘biatches’ part, but either way you get the point.  So, to quote Adam Sandler: drink your ginatonica, and smoke your marijuanica, and have a happy, happy Hanukkah!

The Russian way of educating children

A distant memory came to mind the other day. Back in Russia, well technically it was in Riga, Latvia my parents decided to get my brother and I English lessons in the anticipation of our future move to the United States. This was about a year before we actually immigrated, so we thought it would give us plenty of time to learn the language… On top of private tutoring, we also had English lessons in school, however as we found out later it was a total waste of time. Not only was I NOT learning how to speak English, but it was confusing the hell out of me to have to go between Latvian language and English. Since Latvian was the main language of this former Soviet Republic, those children whose first language was Russian had to learn it in school. On top of learning Latvian, which by the way has a Latin alphabet where Russian is Cyrillic (more confusion there), going back and forth between English and Latvian made all the pronunciations that much harder.
Take this Latvian word as an example: Piens. In Latvian it means milk, and you would pronounce it just like its spelled: Pii-E-N-S, however in English you would pronounce the same word either: Pie-N-SA, or P-NSA. See the confusion? Also according to my English teacher at school, I was never going to speak English because I was absolutely awful at it. Hmm, well… not much I can say here except for wishing I’d remembered her name so I could send her a very sweet letter, all in English. Unfortunately, I do not.

I vaguely remember forcing myself into her classroom every day, only to hear her monotonously berate the students about their lack of brain cells when it came to English. It was definitely a very effective way to encourage students to apply themselves harder. Now that I look back at all my teachers in Russia, it was almost THE protocol of how they were SUPPOSE to teach: berate, abuse, humiliate.  And it never failed; every chance they got to make fun of you, they took it! Somehow it was supposed to make us better students, which at the time I didn’t understand or care for and it only made all of us more apprehensive and stressed.

The strange thing about all of that is somehow it worked! Not only did I learn how to speak English, but obviously to write and read as well… Maybe this whole verbal abuse is not such a bad thing for children. What I mean is, take a look at most Russians, they are for the most part accomplished, well-read, ambitious, and educated individuals. Sure they are not the most balanced, calm, mild-tempered, soft-spoken, shy, aggressive-less people in the world, but who needs that? That’s why they are one of the most feared people in the world.  And when you got that going for you, who needs to be chemically balanced?

Grandma and My Poor Kitten…

The other day my kids asked me if I had a pet when I was a child, which made me tell them a little story about the kitten we had for a week.  This story went something like this:

When I was about eight-years-old and my brother five, we begged our parents to get us a dog or a cat all the time.  For as long as I can remember my Father was allergic to dogs.  Wait, let me re-phrase that.  For as long as I could remember in my old age of eight, my Father TOLD us that he was allergic to dogs.  He wasn’t very clear on what would happen to him if he came in contact with one, but still VERY allergic.  So, we started asking for a cat…

One beautiful, overcast, and raining summer morning in Latvia (it always rained), my brother and I woke up to a brand new kitten purring at our beds.  Yes, my brother and I shared a bedroom for a very long time.  In fact all siblings, grandparents and sometimes distant relatives shared rooms in Russia.  Going back to the kitten.

It was a typical grey, not-very-attractive kitten but to us he was the most beautiful cat in the world!  He was playful and sweet, during the day.  At night, he turned into a monster who hissed and scratched, and ripped everything to shreds.  My Grandmother wasn’t so thrilled about having another mouth to feed in the house, and every chance she got she let us know how much she hated the damn thing.  I started suspecting something when my she made little comments like, “Oh I hope the little thing never gets eaten by anything when you let him outside!”  Or “I sure hope he lives a long life with us!”  I don’t know if any of you reading this see where this might be going, my kids sure didn’t…

One a not so beautiful, overcast but NOT a rainy morning we woke up to my Grandmother sitting very quietly in the corner of the room, just as my Grandfather blared the radio, as he did every morning in order to get us out of bed (let me remind you this was summer, no school, nowhere to go, and they let us sleep in til 8:30).  I didn’t see the kitten anywhere, and began to panic.  We all went out looking for him.  After looking all over the house and outside for days, my Grandmother finally told us that the cat ran away and got hit by a car!  And yes, he died…

I cried and cried for days after, and my parents promised to get us another kitten soon.  Yea, that never happened although we did get an Afghan Hound puppy for a whole day once!  Somehow when my Father wanted this beautiful dog, his allergies went away suddenly…  However, after the first pee and poop on the floor of our tiny two-bedroom apartment, my Father’s allergies returned and the puppy had to be taken away…  To this day I am not sure what happened to him, he simply disappeared.

The real kicker of this story is that years later I learned the real truth about what happened to that kitten!  Once my Grandmother’s animosity towards the cat grew to the point of no return, she decided to simply get rid of it.  So instead of telling us that she gave him back to the people we got him from, she made up a story of him being unhappy in our house, running away and getting hit by a car.  Isn’t that nice?

What can I say…  That’s how we do it in Russia…

Supermarket Memories…

Every time I’m at the Supermarket, I start to remember my very first trip to one just like it.  When you come to America from the former Soviet Union and enter ANY grocery store, you are bound to go into shock.  As I’ve written before, the shelves of U.S.S.R.’s grocery stores were usually empty so when you see rows and rows of food completely untouched, you wonder how its even possible!  I kept thinking why do Americans need five different brands of Raisin Bran?  Isn’t one enough?  Aren’t they all the same Raisins and Bran?  I didn’t know that they made different kinds of stool helper?  What my Mother wanted to know was why in the world anyone would want to mix milk and bran together?  According to our Jewish stomachs, that would put you in a “diarrhea coma” for at least 3 days!  Why would Americans want to do that to themselves?

My then 10-year-old brother wanted to know why Americans can’t share and ship some of that food over to Russia…  It only makes sense, I mean when shelves are never empty, doesn’t that mean there is plenty of it?  If you don’t need it, share it.  That’s the Communist way.

These days when I stand in front of a cereal isle, I still find myself pondering which cereal to get.  Too many choices, too many varieties…  I am not good with too many choices, but give me two items and I can pick one with no problem.  Other people seem to know what they want, I watch them go down the isle, grab a box and leave.  Me?  Well, you can usually find me still standing there fifteen minutes later.  I guess when you grow up without any options, when you are given whatever it is that the government thinks you need… its tough to make a decision.  And it doesn’t ONLY apply to cereal, everything in life that requires a choice between many options, I have a hard time with.  America is overflowing with tangible things, I don’t know how anyone can ever make a decision.  That’s why I usually send my husband to do grocery shopping because if I go there, I won’t be seen for many hours.  But, I am learning and getting faster at it.  Last week it only took me ten minutes to pick out bread!