Chanukah Lessons and Carols

The first day of Chanukah has been spent thusly: riding the dog (that's Depression Era speak for Greyhound bus) from Port Authority to my Mother's Old Kentucky Home in Upstate New York, where I've been met with a Christmas tree and a feast of roast pork loin with pickled peaches. Obviously, I've never felt the need to keep Kosher, and given the choice of holidays (being both demi-Jew and demi-Catholic), I keep Christmas and Yom Kippur--the rest are forgettable. However, today we learned a few choice things (and why not credit the Festival of Lights and Yahweh's abiding holy-day spirit?).

Aside from the lost rock doves bobbing about, Port Authority is a den of misery and rot, a most certain hellmouth. I spent a good part of the morning waiting in its bowels in an interminable line behind some kind of pixie-haired sociopath who was babbling (also interminably) to two sweet, sad boys. She spun a morbid tale of Christmas 2007, wherein she and her father played an ugly trick on her kid sister. Kid sister Kathy, aged 15, had wanted a cellphone since her 13th birthday, had begged and begged. All of her friends and enemies and teachers and relatives and acquaintances and future acquaintances and future non-acquaintances had one (or two!). Pops and pixie thought it would be a gas if they wrapped up an old cellphone, placed it under the tree and, come Christmas morning, let her believe (for one bright moment) that she had been granted a Christmas wish, only to dash it with a cruel and clumsy, "Psych! We didn't buy you a plan!" When she opened the package, Kathy was indeed ecstatic. She ran about the den kissing and hugging everyone. Then mother began to weep, running from the room crying "I'll have no part in this!" Kathy looked about stunned, confused, ultimately devastated; she locked herself away for hours. And this morning, as she told the story, this monster was still laughing, saying "she's so fucking spoiled." Spoiled? I think it's a perfectly normal reaction. I think, come Christmas 2008, if I was Kathy, raised in an environment of mistrust and false love, I'd be a barefoot, pregnant meth-cooker. To be limited and excluded by your own family's narrow means is no shame, but it is certainly no joke either. Yet as I stood dumbstruck, smarting for Kathy, I spyed an angel, a young gent with the gerth of a defensive lineman holding a wreath of red carnations. The gold banner of text across the center read: BUTTERHEAD.

You see, the Lord Giveth, and He taketh away. The ride north through snow (with a touch of sun) was beautiful, but also bleak (I think I saw a Red Lobster converted into a motor inn).