Kirmizi_ada

The magnetic gates at the Karstadt shopping center down the street are now draped in "Frohe Weinachten" cosies. Grocery stores are stocking organic Glühwein in their vitrines for 2.95 EUR. And to think that Halloween was all of 13 hours ago! A bargain-table placard at the Dussmann bookstore on Friedrichstraße reads “Es weinachtet ein bisschen” [“It is Christmas-ing a little.”] To which I secretly begged: Bring it On!

While snacking at said Karstadt today—trying to reason away an uninvited meatball in my lentil soup—I set out to ascertain why I adore Christmas so enduringly. This was one of those ventures that could only end in spiritual ruin, I suspected, but nevertheless:

I brushed aside the tinsel-decked, chestnut-roasted bait—the Temptations doing “Rudolph”, Jessica Simpson and/or David Bowie doing “The Little Drummer Boy”, Mariah Carey in a glittery Santa Hat, flammable decorations, my great aunts Ruth and Margaret knitting mittens, and eggnog with rum. These were surely all topical expressions of a more deeply anchored devotion.

I knew I loved my family, airports, and snow; seeing any of these always makes me happy. I knew that I had once loved Windham Hill’s holiday piano music, and still grin in its direction, as one might grin in the presence of an inscrutably beloved ex-spouse. Petit-bourgeois and sentimental to the very hilt, I had to acknowledge that LL Bean, Trader Joes, and Restoration Hardware could adequately outfit my own personal afterlife. But I also thought about how I am a big-old atheist, and that—though I may long to smell the myrrh and moist straw in the manger—Jesus’ birth itself gets only about a 5 on my divine seismograph. So tell: why do I promptly rise up in joyous song when everything turns red and green each November? And why do I feel no desire to break with this wassail-slinging madness?

Which is when I turned with a plaintive whimper to "Born to Kvetch", a fantastic little biography of the Yiddish language by Michael Wex. On page 21, he talks about how nitl nakht (Yiddish for Christmas) is a day when some observant Jews used to take a break from studying Torah—a prayer practice that, among other things, blesses the souls of the deceased. Torah-study on Christmas, it turned out, might be an inadvertent leg-up for the goyim.

Do I maybe jones for a little nitl nakht myself, a break from my more or less earnest study of the world in order to watch Washington’s fundamentalist cabal fumble through its yearly behemoth of tax write-offs, family melt-downs, and bankrupt well-wishes for the troops? Or am I, too, just hooked on the ecclesiastical calendar—the eternal circle of folly and reconciliation, months of potatoes for an hour of mutton, boundless domination in West Asia for one snow-angel on the front lawn?

I don’t know, but boy am I excited for X-Mas 06. Staving off North Sea winds with mulled cider in early December, pre-Christmas watching Lifetime with my mom, New Years on a Greyhound to Vermont. Maybe Nancy Pilosi will even be Speaker of the House by then.

It’s a twisted mystery, but the blessings never fail.