I Need Christmas to Save Me, All Year.

I am Jewish. And with the strength of a thousand reindeer, I LOVE Christmas.

Hanukkah is great and, now that we have kids, we make a big deal about it. But we all know Christmas is just better than Hanukkah: it’s marketed better, it has more lore, it encompasses so much more than the story of Baby Jesus and it’s so fun to look at. My mother has pointed out that Hanukkah is the Festival of Lights and yet, ironically, most Jewish houses don’t put up lights. Another marketing fail on our part. But this essay isn’t about Hanukkah vs Christmas.

I’m married to a man who is half Jewish, so we get to do Christmas Eve at my mother-in-law’s and it’s SUPURB! She’s Italian-American so she does the Seven Fishes and goes heavy on the crab and shrimp and I slurp it up like a harp seal who broke into an estuary. Then I eat a sleeve of See’s Chocolate Peppermints and spend the night floating among the Christmas lights, resplendent in their warm glow.

My Seven Fishes feeding frenzy.

Last year I had one glass of champagne and fell asleep on the couch and the whole family just let me sleep. For a mother of two that’s, like, a little irresponsible? But also it’s a Christmas miracle. 

 

I love it all so so much. BUT. If Nancy said she wasn’t doing Christmas this year, I wouldn’t try to save Christmas. I’d be like, “oh, bummer. Okay, that gives me a day to clean out the garage.”

Because for most of my life, Christmas — the Christmas season in general — had never been about family. As an adult, I’ve spent many Christmases alone and I’ve never once questioned that that wasn’t totally normal. The only Christmas I remember even spending with my father since I was a child was a few years ago when, for some reason, he and I were alone together on Christmas Eve and we watched The Christmas Chronicles in absolute silence until he fell asleep at like 8:30 and then I ate cereal and checked my phone until 1am. My father doesn’t remember this night at all.  

The Christmas season represents the few weeks a year I get to not just take a break, but take a break and not feel bad about taking said break; not berate myself for not booking an acting role, selling a show, selling out a venue, or doing better in general. I get to take a break from the required intermittent self loathing it takes to fuel a career in show business, where you have to create your own energy from scratch and do it over and over, accepting rejection as easily as one accepts, say, a gift on Christmas morning (not that I would know the feeling). And I think part of that break is knowing that other people are also taking a break, so it’s like a collective, industry-wide deep breath — a deep breath all the wellness accounts I follow say I should “make more space for,” but… do deep breaths pay mortgages? And now: a little bit of background on me to substantiate that last half a paragraph you just read…

Me taking a picture with the Christmas tree in our hotel lobby like a child.

I have been touring as a headlining comedian  since I was 25.  For years I toured year-round, not knowing that comics took breaks or that some seasons were better than others. I just worked. 

Looking back, even as a 20-something, even as a woman in her early 30s, I was a little physically broken. My neck always hurt, I was sick a lot, I played a lot of shows with a cold or with my voice at half mast. I had my ENTs personal cell. I looked tired. I was tired. But I just kept plugging away, inelegantly making it up as I went. I had no mentors. I didn’t really know the right way to tour; the best hotels, how to eat right on the road or what I could be doing to make touring easier. This was around 2008-ish to 2016? Social media hadn’t yet seeped its way into every facet of our lives, saturating our brains, wallets and bodies with the concept of “self care.” There was no emphasis on women relaxing on Sleepy Girl Sundays or Stay in Saturdays or Immobile Girly Mondays. There was just me, figuring it out, trying to see how late Subway was open after 3 shows at a random comedy club in Kansas. (P.S. There was nothing elegant about the internet in the 2010s. Everyone was wearing leggings with kittens with lasers coming out of their eyes and where we were all too digitally naive to realize Twitter was forever and Instagram was a drug.)

Taken last year but this was my vibe most of the 2010s

When I was in airports, around the holidays, I would buy homemaking magazines. I found comfort in gazing at colorful pictures of Thanksgiving side dishes, like an autumnal fairytale. I would fall asleep dreaming of candy-themed Christmas trees I would never have and lights that were too much work to put up. I’d earmark gorgeous Holiday cocktails too intricate to make more than four of and fantasize about serving fluffy Christmas marshmallow topped hot chocolates in thick mugs by a fire in a whimsical snowy garden (I live in Los Angeles, I don’t even like chocolate).

I especially liked when a magazine would do a “Holiday Do-s and Don’t-s” list, I would just read the “Don’t’s” and I would judge those who had made the holiday faux pax of bringing store bought cookies with the price tag still affixed! “How tacky?” I would think as I hoarded apples in the Delta lounge. 

I worked really hard and eventually I bought my own house and one thing I knew for sure was that, because I was always on the road, I didn’t get to be in that home I had bought often enough. 

So when Christmas came around and I was home for more than a week at a time, I had this emotional mission to make up for all the coziness I didn’t get all year. I would plan a big holiday party, invite all the friends over whom I never got to see, decorate my house within an inch of its life and mainline holiday cheer. I would get my holiday fix all at once, straight from concentrate.

Every December I would go to downtown LA to Moskatels (RIP, it’s closed now), a decor warehouse with warehouse pricing. Everything was always on sale because if you are the kind of person who buys your Christmas decor two weeks before Christmas you are already late and they are already stocking for Valentine’s Day. I would bulk buy Christmas lights in every color and bushels and bushels of something called Buffalo Snow (the name has nothing to do with fluffy buffalo, turns out. Buffalo Batt and Felt used to sell their polyester stuffing as fake snow. Deck the halls with polyester!) and scour the aisles for any holiday decoration that was cheap, marked down and juuuuust not ugly enough that I could take it home. Every year I would invite my friend Josh who did (and still does) set dec over and we would cover my living room in lights, that fluffy polyester and any ornament that didn’t break on the car ride home. I would bake cookies, make Christmas tree-themed deli platters and I would create an entire winter wonderland for my friends. There were cranberries everywhere. I did this for years. When I met my husband, who is a chef and cookbook author, he took over the food and the party got a lot better. 

20 years later, I still feel the same way I’ve always felt about Christmas, that the holiday season is the great, collective, spiritual slowing down. The ephemera of Christmas relaxes me so much that I actively seek it out perennially. Even in March, I seek out Christmas tchotchke stores when I’m on the road, just to be in The Christmas. Just to look at plastic conifers, inhale synthetic cinnamon.  Just to stare at the glistening trinkets and warm white lights and think about how, in a few months it will be Christmas and I’ll be stress free and safe. “From now on your troubles will be out of sight.” Meanwhile I’m in Pendleton, Kentucky at someplace called The Christmas Cottage and it’s 90 degrees outside and I’m just some out of season Jew holding a felt reindeer figurine at check out.

It’s not just the Holiday season, it’s the decoration for it that I hold as a sacred chestnut. My husband wouldn’t even care if we had furniture let alone a multi LED light table runner complete with matching gold pinecones. He has never once asked me about my collection of velvet Christmas mushrooms. Not once!

This is literally just for one side table.

I even have a decor timeline:

• Oct 1: Halloween specific light up display on the exterior of the house mixed with a lot of real pumpkins. Inside is all fall decor; pinecones, pumpkins, real and fake, and magnolia garlands in green and brown. All autumnal candles are strategically placed to create a scent-scape that moves through the house with notes of cinnamon, firewood, caramel and vanilla.

We get these on Oct 1.

• Nov 1: All things spooky come down from the house exterior except the pumpkins; they stay baking in the sun. Inside I pepper in bronze magnolia garlands and add twinkle lights IN the magnolia garland on the mantle and set it to a timer that I have to rebuy every year because I always forget where I put it. A fall wreath is ordered and it goes on the front door.

• Nov 28: Pumpkins are offered up as a sacrifice to the birds. A winter specific wreath by Peads and Barnett is picked up at the farmers market. All fall candles are put away. Douglas fir candles are set out as well as this one Maple Syrup candle I got in Vermont that never seems to run out. Menorah is put out, decorative dreidels and gold coins strewn around. Various garlands of stars, candy canes and more twinkle lights are taped up and I start the slow drip of wrapping presents that appear under the mantel for the next few weeks. 

Example of transitional fall to Christmas decor. Note the pumpkins and garland but now a Christmas chicken has been added.

I think decorating for the holidays might be my only true passion outside of comedy and my family. I guess that’s ok? Maybe sad? 

But I never understood, deep down, what the holidays actually mean to me and what they actually do for me until literally last week.

It was my only weekend home all fall. We were going to have a lovely weekend, do Halloween on Friday and hang out Saturday, wake up Sunday and all be together: Me, Noah, our daughter Sierra (3)  and our son Ethan (19 months). But Saturday, starting very early in the morning, Ethan wasn’t feeling well. My poor son had contracted Hand Foot and Mouth (a medieval disease designed to punish children for interacting with each other) for the second time in four weeks. He looked fine, but he was miserable. He would just whimper and cry, not understanding why he was in pain, why he couldn’t swallow, why eating hurt. The cries would vary from tears to moans. Long little moans, like a baby cow, is one way I can put it. The other way I can put it is his moans sounded like the stifled screams Ving Rhames belted out when he was ball gagged getting and assaulted from behind in Pulp Fiction. You guys can clutch your pearls all you want at that, I didn’t contract HFM, so I’m bullet proof, you can’t hurt me.

 He cried, endlessly for two solid days and nights. In addition to him I have my daughter who is three and just wants attention. It broke me and my husband. Just an endless cycle of Ethan’s clothes, soaking wet from all the drool his mouth produced that he couldn’t swallow, sheets, regular laundry, dishes, chores all set to the backdrop of his endless whaling exacerbated by the feeling of helplessness when your child is in pain and not getting nutrition. We took turns fielding him, holding him, trying different foods to feed him, handling him but being mindful of the fact that his drool might be contagious. Ugh, what a weird, exhausting, tap dance. It was the most depleted I had ever felt in my parenting. To make things worse and weirder I was informed that one of our neighbors had had a mental break and had been making a habit of standing outside his house and yelling “FUCK THE JEWS, FUCK ISRAEL” over and over before drunk driving away. Down our street. Where all of our children play.

So that was the weekend. 

Stress is like a Katamari ball. And it just subsumes other, unrelated stresses until you have amassed a gigantor stress that aims to crush you under its weight and absorb you. My frustration about my son turned to an specious anger at the school turned into an anger at how expensive it was, everything is, turned into me being mad I didn’t sell a show this year reminding myself about the, at times, paralyzing amount of rejection I face in this business and the ticking clock of hoping to get something creatively going before the monolith of The Holidays sets in and every exec puts their phone on mute until January 15th, turned into me being angry that no matter how hard I try to give us a nice life I can’t afford the magical bubble of defense my kids will need to combat all the Jew hatred this world has to offer both latent, simmering and obvious… It’s all enough to choke on. And Ethan was still crying. 

 I held his little body with one arm, trying to cue him (and myself) to take deep breaths.  And I, with my free hand, so numb from mental exhaustion… Scrolled on my phone. I was looking at “Recycled Amber Glass Ornaments. Set of 3” on some website that had the word “farmhouse” in the URL. The day was such an exhausting blur of whimpering, half chewed food and a neighborhood group text about the legalities of placing a 5150 on an adult... My avoidance took over and all I kept thinking was “it’s already November. We need to decorate for the holidays.” 

I went to the garage and, like Pizza Rat, dragged our dusty boxes containing all of our decorations into the living room.

I surveyed their contents, positive whatever I had I could do with more of. I kept googling and re-googling “fun holiday decor” “non-ugly Hanukkah decor” “holiday indoor lights, festive”. Seeing the intensity in my eyes and pouring out of my thumbs onto my keyboard, my husband asked “what is it exactly that you are looking for?” That stopped me. “I don’t know, actually.” Half the calming effect of Christmas is just in the looking. Did I really need another two toned 6 foot magnolia leaf garland?

Yes, you always need more than one.

Of course there could always be one more light strand, one more perfect winter owl-in-a-scarf trinket? I think part of me thought if I can just order the perfect thing and get the house decorated then the house will be comfortable and we will all be safe.  That’s what the Christmas season has always been for me, a mentally safe space. It’s safe because my body isn’t moving and my mind can be still. I can hide from my own thoughts and from the self applied pressures of my own career, my own life.

 I use the Christmas spirit, the holiday spirit, the fall feels as an emotional salve all year long. When I’m going through it, when I’m exhausted. I think about the decorations. I think about the Pepparkakor cookies I’m gonna bake and gift in perfect silver gift boxes. I think of the shiny bronze acorns, felt holly and Sugar Plum fairy figurines I will let my daughter decorate the coffee table with. Some people meditate or look at water, I look at Christmas villages, gingerbread centerpieces and white LED lights in the shape of small stars. I think that’s actually the healing power of the holidays, knowing that we have them to look forward to and being able to take refuge in that thought anytime of year.  Even as I type this, I can feel my shoulders relax.

My son felt better the next day. I felt better the next day because he felt better and because I had put up some Christmas lights and a garland…And a Turkey candle. And a bowl of pinecones. That day I decorated for Thanksgiving and Christmas all at once, because we needed it. We put the kids to bed and I just sat in my perfectly living room, a small string of Star of David lights flickering at 10am. And took a deep breath. And then scrolled on my phone to see if I could find that perfect decoration.