cheap eve isk or fire up the stove griddle
though to me it smelled less like coffee and more like a burning shoe. ‘I’d light the menorah,’ said my mother,
‘but remember what happened last year with the curtains catching on fire.’ The curtains had gone up in a blaze
and we had thrown a punch bowl of eggnog on them to douse the flames, and the eggnog had sizzled and cooked
into the fabric until the whole house smelled like a diner omelet.
‘That’s OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll light the menorah tomorrow for you.’ Though I would forget to do it. Every year it was
my job to clean it, scrape off the previous year’s wax with pins and a fork, so perhaps my forgetting was
convenient.
‘Thanks, honey,’ said my mom, who never called me ‘honey.’ Almost never. The television was on, murmuring
low and flashing its colors. My mother flicked it off with annoyance. ‘A grinch who stole Christmas?’ she said.
‘With all that’s going on in the world we should have to deal withthat?’
In the morning my brother and I came downstairs within ten minutes of each other. The Christmas tree this
year’or Hanukkah hemlock, as my mother still called it’was a pre-lit affair ordered online. The McLellans’
Christmas tree farm had recently gone out of business and my parents had resorted to an environmentally sound
plastic pine from Hammacher Schlemmer. Ornaments like blue fish and beribboned, clove-studded oranges were
clustered in the middle. Old dangly earrings that had lost their mates were hung on the more delicate branches.
My mother had placed at the top a large tinselly Star of David, angled rakishly, like a geometry problem.
Possibly, in late-morning light,cheap eve isk, this was just how all irony presented itself.
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My parents were at the kitchen table eating cold cereal but offering to make us latkes with applesauce or regular
pancakes or both, both being a holiday tradition. ‘I chopped the potatoes and onions up yesterday,’ said my
mom. Soon, I knew, she would get a skillet of oil going,buy runescape money, or fire up the stove griddle, and the house would fill
with slick oniony air, like the greasy spoon on Main Street,cheap lineage 2 adena, permeating our clothes and hair.
‘Thanks, maybe later?’ I said with the question mark our generation believed meant politeness but which baffled
our parents. Outside the morning was bright. I liked the holy,warcraft gold, rejoicing look of it: the many gray Christmases of
my childhood had depressed me. And apparently not just me: one year the holiday card my mother sent out was
an October photo of my brother and me, with a caption that readThe children. In some dead leaves.
The light covering of snow on the fields out back and in the yard between the barn and the house was already
melting in the morning sun. Ochre grass was poking through in patches. Beyond, the incline part of the
acreage’which my father had sold off last year ‘for a pretty penny, or, maybe not pretty exactly, but a penny with
a great personality?’had been resold by the Amish to others and was already being developed into something
called Highland Estates. The weather was so warm that construction had continued into December. There were
two yellow backhoes jutting into the sky. The houses were going to be huge, my mother said, with treeless lots
and phony gazebos and turrets and patios to look back at us in mutual rebuke.
‘They don’t like trees because squirrels climb up them and get in their attic and chew on the exercise equipment
no longer in use. Now, without trees’ The squirrels’ll head elsewhere and the attic will fill up with moths and