Holidaze

Anyone who knows me knows that I love Christmas and that, as a partial Jew, I feel conflicted every year around this time when I feel the need to surround myself with lights, pine needles, elves, holly and the mythical (to a West Coast girl like me) snow.

What's a partial Jew, you ask? Someone who is neither here nor there, a perpetual state in my life and one I've come to embrace, more or less. It relates to being Jewish through my paternal bloodlines (on my mother and father's sides) and growing up without traditional, conservative or specific religion. Instead mine was a more free-form interpretive childhood in which ethics and morality were always important but not handed to me wrapped up in Torah scroll or a book with onion-skin-thin gilded pages. My world was one of gurus from India, monks from Tibet, yogurt from the Golden Temple in Eugene, Oregon and a charismatic white guy named Werner in whose kitchen I volunteered for a time, fascinated by his house with fabric palm trees curving up into the Victorian ceiling in the off-limits living room.

When I was eight my friend Dawn and I traipsed into a church after being barefoot in the rain and, for cookies, I accepted Jesus into my heart, confused when he didn't open up my chest and walk right in. Once the cookies were consumed and we went home, that was the end of my so called rebirth. Then when I was twelve I started going to a liberal reform temple with my mom and brothers, but by then I already knew I didn't fit in and I was self-conscious enough not to do a good job faking-it. I also had a hell of a time with the "ch" sound in Hebrew.

I adore the kitsch and beauty and the incredible potential that an unwrapped present under the Christmas tree evokes. I want every year to get lost in that world, the way I did sometimes as a child when I would lay on the floor under the lowest branches of the lit-up tree decorated with my mom's beloved wooden ornaments and strings of popcorn and cranberries. To look up into the magic of the tree was to imagine myself a princess, or snow queen, or poor little rich girl. I felt transported. This is the feeling I get every year at Christmas, when I'm not obsessed with "getting it all done" or worried about being a bad Jew or bourgeois consumer.

Sometimes I'm right in the feeling, and sometimes I'm outside it, wishing I could get in, which means that I am imagining there is someone else out there who is having a more authentic experience than me. They are actually rich. Or Christian. Or happy. Or they are Jewish, annoyed by the celebrations in a country that doesn't try to mask its conflation of church and state while trying to protect themselves and their children from that horrible feeling of being continually othered.

I am wise enough to know all experience is authentic, but if I let myself, I can get lost in the fantasy of being someone else. Thank god, somewhere along the way I discovered irony. It's gotten me through a lot. I can be both inside and outside my experience - enjoying the moment, laughing about it as I observe the hilarity and teeter-totter on the edge of many identities. I am not one thing or another, but some of this and some of that. I don't fit into one specific box, but as I've discovered, neither does anyone else really. And depending on how strong or weak I am feeling on a given day, I may be no more than my skin, flesh and gender. Depends whose doing the looking and how far they push their projections. Not to mention my hormones, they seem to color an awful lot lately.

So - last night me and my partner Em and two good friends went to see Margaret Cho, a rebel Korean American in your face raunchy-mouthed beautiful wonder. I wore my dreidel earrings and laughed until I peed over thumb-nail porn, butch women who turn out to be straight, pot lollipops, sex and more sex, and because it was Margaret, poop. She is profane and hilarious and makes me feel embraced for being exactly who I am.

Afterward, we traipsed through the elegant old-money lobbies of two Nob Hill hotels in San Francisco. I was taken by the huge bright Christmas trees, the fancy society ladies with their mink stoles and holiday bouquets and the elaborate Corinthian-inspired columns. I was reminded of The Breakers, a Vanderbilt house in Newport, RI built by the wealth produced during the Industrial Revolution. I visited the mansion one Christmas years ago and found myself overcome with emotion, crying as we toured the giant remant of wealth, so beautiful, disturbing and dreamy.

But it was the giant gingerbread house in the lobby of The Fairmont that really got me last night. It smelled so spicy and sweet I had the urge to spread myself across its surface and lick it from one candy to another, like an oral dot-to-dot. It made me feel both childlike and perverse. This is sort of how I feel about my love of Christmas.