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Dec
25
Read Part IVb here and IVa here, Part III here and here, Part II here, and Part I here and here and here.
No one cooks lasagna like Mrs. Caprio.
I’ve known this woman for 37 years and I still call her Mrs. Caprio. And her husband, I still call Mr. Caprio. Everything about their home and family looked different from mine when I was growing up, but everything about their hearts and sentiments has always said that we’re far more alike than different.
My memories of Mrs. Caprio from childhood differ from how she is today. She no longer keeps the plastic on the floor surfaces or the living room furniture. She displays an ease around her grandchildren that I don’t recall from the hours I spent in her home playing with her middle daughter and my childhood best friend, Linda, or watching television at their home. When I think of her now, I see her smile and hear her laugh.
But when I was a child, the predictability of rules and orderliness in the Caprio home contrasted sharply with how life proceeded in my home. Not that we didn’t have rules or order, but chaos reigned in my home during much of my childhood – what felt like chaos, in comparison, to me.
Linda and I attached to one another immediately upon entering Kindergarten. The tightness of our friendship induced teachers to place us in separate classrooms every other year, because together, we caused too much distraction. So we were together in Kindergarten, Second, Fourth and then, in Fifth grade, when we had three teachers instead of one, we were in the “White” group.
(In 1972, schools actively “tracked” kids and the White group led the Blue and the Red – though I don’t recall the rank order between Blue and Red. What strikes me now, in writing about this, in a way I’ve never thought of when just talking about it, is that there were no African-American kids in our neighborhood or our school, so being called the White group didn’t stick out as odd to me then. But now, as I write it and see it in print, I think, Oh My God, that’s awful. How could they call us the WHITE group? It almost seems arrogant and in 2005, would never be acceptable, and not just because tracking fell into disfavor years ago.)
Linda and I shared every childhood milestone two girls could accumulate. We played Lost in Space instead of “house,” we swooned over David Cassidy, we walked to and from school everyday. We had fights over whose street address made a better rhyme (hers did – Fifty-Five Beatrice Drive. Mine didn’t rhyme at all – Seventy Beatrice Drive. But I had to fight anyway.) We sang in choir, took ballet lessons with Mrs. Grande (how perfect a name is that for a ballet teacher) and attempted to be Brownies (she lasted longer than me). We adopted each others last names as our middle names – Linda Geralyn Miller Caprio, and Jill Amy Caprio Miller.
We even chased after the same boy in fifth grade, Marty Russo. He drew cartoons and gave us each an enormous poster-size drawing of Tweety Bird. I had a crush on him, and never realized that, in our very distinctly ethnic neighborhood (primarily Italian) the only possible dance dates for me would come from the handful of Jewish-named boys in a middle school of several hundred students. (This reality contributed to my parents decision that we should move.)
I don’t know when Linda and her family began to welcome me into their home on Christmas and Easter, but I know it started early. Linda’s dad set up the tree and I was invited over to help decorate. Squeaky, the three or four foot tall, stuffed, Stay Puft velour snowman, came out of hiding just around or after Thanksgiving. Frontlawn displays of elves and maybe even a manger graced their front yard.
And then I’d be invited over for the Christmas Day supper.
The Caprios served this meal at midday, around 1 or so. But in my house, we never had supper. We had breakfast, lunch and dinner. Interestingly, the three meals for the day of Shabbat – from Friday sundown to Saturday sundown – occur in time much in line with a midday supper. But since I was raised as a Reform Jew in a family that didn’t do much to observe the Sabbath, I never realized until I lived in Israel in my early 20s that the Caprio’s holiday and even Sunday meal schedule was so close to that of many Jews.
Calling this feast a meal insults Mr. and Mrs. Caprio’s presentation and hospitality. And, although I can’t remember all the specific courses of food, I know that few if any of them resembled anything I ate in my house. And everyone had a little bit of everything; no one scooped out too large portions.
But the piece de resistance at the Caprios wasn’t – and still isn’t – any of Mrs. Caprio’s authentic Italian cooking steeped in years of being made. Rather, the centerpiece of this meal comes from Mr. Caprio, who worked as a meatcutter his whole life until retirement at Foremost Foods. A prime rib so succulent that my husband – a man who substitutes for our synagogue’s cantor and is teaching our son his Bar Mitzvah portion – fantasizes about going back to Connecticut at Christmas just so we can go to the Caprios to eat that meat.
And so, when I read about the pressure to assimilate the holiday of Chanuka with Christmas that some Jews describe, I can’t relate. In fact, I attribute my sense of religious security to my experiences with the Caprios over the last four decades. They set the tone for me – of inviting me in, letting me partake, and never, ever suggesting that my presence was anything more than enjoying other people’s joy, and having some of my own too as I participated with them. No threat. Just exultation in one’s religious observances. That the observance was Christmas never bothered me, and they never impressed that upon me. It was always about the happiness, the fun, the being together.
What do Jews do on Christmas? I can only speak for myself: I wish people who celebrate it a Merry Christmas. And everyone else, a very peaceful day, while I enjoy my family in our way.
By Jill Miller Zimon at 1:18 pm December 25th, 2005 in Politics
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Shalom Jill,
I love the aluminum foil under the Chanukiah.
I remember one year when our family Chanukah gathering occurred on the last evening. We had probably 20 Chanukiot going on the table, each with nine candles. The heat was so intense that all the candles melted before they could burn down. The puddle of wax on table was huge. My brother in law was standing by with the fire extinguisher because he was afraid the whole table would go up.
B’shalom,
Jeff
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