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A Very Mendel Christmas [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-12-17
Where I grew up in the largely Jewish Highbridge enclave of the Bronx, you didn’t see very much Christmas. I only knew two or three families that had trees on Jesup Avenue and you saw very few decorations in E.L. Grant Highway, Jerome Avenue, and 170th Street stores. If it hadn’t been for secular Christmas/Winter songs at PS 104 and then school being closed for a week, we might have missed it altogether – except for one thing.
My father, Manny or Mendel in Yiddish, was severely visually handicapped from childhood. I don’t know if it was somehow compensation, but he had a wonderful baritone voice and crooner like musical timing. Growing up in the 1950s, we were moderately observant Jews and lit Hanukah candles for the eight nights when my father came home from work, but Hanukah then was not what it is now. As children, we received very token gifts, some chocolate coins and a few quarters, Hanukah gelt. We had no Hanukah decorations in the house or paper plates and napkins. I think we ate latkes once that week. In Hebrew school my brother Warren and I learned Hanukah songs and we sang them at the candle lighting.
But Mendel knew, loved, and sang other songs, Christmas songs like White Christmas. So even though Christmas barely existed on Jesup Avenue in the 1950s, when Mendel was home, we always had Christmas music.
With my own family, we celebrated both Hanukah and Christmas, a modest Hanukah but with a lot of latkes, and a more elaborate Christmas with a decorated and lit tree, that my almost adult grandchildren Sadia and Gideon are now in charge of. My son Solomon invented the tradition of crowning the tree with a large gold origami paper crane that signifies a hope for peace, a tradition we still follow. Mendel never commented on our hybrid winter festivities, but I think he secretly enjoyed them, especially the Yule log burning on the television screen accompanied by Christmas music.
Although my father died in 2014 at the age of 94, I realized the other day while working at home on my computer and turning on my Pandora Classical Christmas Radio channel, Mendel’s Christmas music is still here and whenever I hear that music it brings Mendel back.
Merry Christmas Music Mendel.
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