My childhood Decembers were spent outside, looking in as my classmates received video game consoles, new bikes, expensive pogs, banana boats, and even “dreaded” grandma-knit sweaters. My parents never celebrated Christmas. As Israeli Jews, we rarely bothered even for Hanukah, and the idea of eight presents for eight days was as far from my mother’s thoughts as the notion that children should be raised exclusively on pudding, or sent to Thailand for sensitivity training. My birthday was present day, my one and only.
Perhaps because of my deprivation, I regarded holiday specials about Christmas’s “true meaning” with the curiosity of a dog looking at a couple making out. The notion that there was method to the madness perplexed me, even as a little kid. “If we acknowledge that Christmas is so commercial, then why do we keep celebrating it? Why don’t we remove the presents entirely?” I thought. My diction may have been too advanced for a ten-year-old self, but the thought, I swear, was there – lucid, forceful, tiring. Lying in bed the night before Christmas, I would imagine every single lonesome one of my classmates in their Palatine homes, about to swoop down on their presents, and I would imagine myself as the Grinch, seizing my classmates’ presents and forcing them to reflect.
Older now, I no longer feel this way – at least about Christmas. I am grateful for what I have here in Hyde Park: a small room filled with legal books, an unfinished bottle of egg nog, oatmeal, friends. They are simple pleasures, delicate things. Late this evening, I saw a homeless man on the Midway, and, though we didn’t speak, we looked at one another, and I thought, “I know nothing of your life, and the most I can extract from it is some mawkish insight that I’ll write up on facebook.” But, sometimes, there is no need for further meaning: we are happy to be here, to be speaking softly, to be sentient, and that, perhaps, is more meaning than any present can convey.