Print This Post Print This Post

Dec

26

God bless guilt


Like a good Jewish wife, I’ve successfully guilted my husband into playing tunes from his new Chanuka songbook (don’t tell him I said so, but he likes to play for people anyway). The piano’s chords sound festive in our newly cleaned living room, which is really a playroom because, like the good assimilated Jews we are, my kids have more stuff than we do from Chanukas past, mainly because our relatives live out of town and, feeling guilty that they’re not here with us, and we’re not there with them, they used to ship obscene-sized boxes full of gifts for each of our three kids during Chanuka and for their birthdays. For two or three years, we were getting up to eight gifts per kid per set of grandparents, great-grandmother and aunts and uncles (five sets of those). For us, especially in our leaner days, this meant that we’d only have to give our kids a couple of gifts because of the avalanche from everyone else.

And, not to forget the fair and balanced person I try to portray myself to be, every December, I fill up to five large plastic lawn/leaf bags full of stuff. Again, obscene. But at least one of those bags is full of gently used items that go to Good Will, another often has unopened presents that I hid after my kids got them for their birthdays (usually duplicates or items I wouldn’t let them have, like the Bratz lunchbox full of candy and the toy armored vehicles with hundreds of plastic toy soldiers; in twelve years and three kids, no one has ever given us a simulated weapon, thank God) and at least one other is full of boxes, broken containers, and the assorted flotsam and jetsem that playrooms accumulate under bookcases and rugs.

Speaking of leaner days, for years, my husband and I exchanged nothing but “coupons” that we’d make from construction paper. Coupons for back rubs, a week of ironing, a month of mowing the lawn, a night when the other spouse could choose any movie rental at all, no matter how much the other hated that genre, and so on. I still have some of the faded coupons stuffed in with old Valentine’s Day, birthday and anniversary cards.

As for the Zimons of Ohio, the kids and Jeff got calendars tonight and I got a pair of pajamas, woohoo. (It’s what I asked for, so that is in fact a real woohoo.) Of course, I have a cheat sheet slipped inside my bathing suit drawer: I know what everyone’s getting each night. I love being the giver.

Jeff Hess of Have Coffee Will Write tackles the assimilation issue connected to how Chanuka is celebrated. I can’t argue with him – it’s true. In many Jewish families, presents occupy a centerpiece. And I’ve confessed this sin already – we do give gifts.

However, my family gives at least equal time to the holiday’s traditions and history, we give items to others during the eight days and my children will be choosing both something from their own possessions and going shopping with me to buy toys for donation. Likewise, my oldest is thinning books from his personal library so that we can give them to a program that benefits Cleveland public school kids. We focus on the family commaraderie that celebrating together fosters. And I have to say, this year, we’ve succeeded like never before. Poo poo poo, as they say to keep away evil spirits after you’ve recognized something good.

Chappy Second Night of Chanuka.

Bookmark and Share

By Jill Miller Zimon at 5:53 pm December 26th, 2005 in Politics 

Comments

Comments are closed.

"));