I Will Never Embrace Christmas

Sometime in the spring of 1990, as a tenth grader at Bruton High School in Williamsburg, Virginia, and still newly arrived from Amherst, Massachusetts, I embarked on my first, and heretofore only, political campaign. I ran for class president. Or maybe student council? I can’t really recall. In fact, I remember just two things about the race:

1. I lost, in large part because I did not take the steps required to get my name on the ballot. Virginia high-schoolers were not big on write-ins.

2. My campaign consisted of plastering the hallways with posters—long strings of dot-matrixed paper produced with Apple’s Print Shop program in the computer lab—one of which aimed to capitalize on the zeitgeist. It read: I HATE BART SIMPSON. VOTE FOR ME, MATT GROSS.

This week every media outlet in existence is celebrating the 35th anniversary of The Simpsons, the animated sitcom that changed America, because everybody loves the Simpsons—even and maybe especially me—and because although the number 35 is fairly meaningless, they desperately need the clicks and the attention before the Trump administration sues them out of existence. As a major media outlet as well, Trying! is no different: We willingly bend to the winds of groupthink coverage!

When I was 15, though, I was a bit of a punk. No, that’s too strong a term. I was, let’s say, a nonconformist. And when I saw everyone around me succumbing to Bartmania, my instinct was to trash him, partly for the attention—which I did not, it turned out, receive—but mainly because I felt some ownership of the Simpsons¹.

I’d been a fan since the beginning, when they were just short subjects that ran on the Tracey Ullman Show, crudely drawn and cheaply animated but still capturing something about American family life we’d never seen before: the messiness, violence, inadequacy, humor, and love among unrepentantly flawed and deeply familiar characters. That this was happening in a cartoon was mind-blowing. I’d spent my young life obsessed with cartoons, preferring them to live-action TV long past the age when most kids started watching, I don’t know, The A-Team or Dallas or whatever cartoonish adult dramas aired back then. But I didn’t just want the sugary Saturday-morning slop I’d been fed—I craved animated stories with real stakes and real characters but the freedom to be wildly imaginative, or weird as hell. Apart from Robotech, the Japanese anime series in which characters actually died, and occasional stop-motion experiments on SNL or MTV, there wasn’t much of that. Until the Simpsons.

But the Simpsons felt even more special to me because I already knew its creator, Matt Groening, from his comic strip, Life in Hell. Life in Hell was a clear precursor to the Simpsons, from its awkward characters (goggle-eyed buck-toothed rabbits, the fez-wearing couple Akbar and Jeff) to its absurdist attitude toward the ruling systems of American society and the endless challenges of human interaction. It was made for me.

Life in Hell appeared as a syndicated strip in The Valley Advocate, the alt-weekly that was distributed for free throughout the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts. (And holy crap! It still exists, and in print!) I can’t say I read any of the articles, but as I roamed around town with my skater friends, I’d keep an eye out for it, eager to ogle Groening’s latest and, okay, the back-of-book erotic-services ads that supported the business. I also can’t say I understood the concept of syndication then, but since there were so many talented cartoonists in the region then anyway, it felt like Life in Hell was ours—made by a weirdo who might be our neighbor (or our teacher!) for weirdos just like us. To then watch, as 1989 came to a close, hordes of normie classmates cry out Cowabunga, dude! with no knowledge of Bart’s rabbit ancestor Bongo, well, that made me bristle.

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Thankfully, I’d already learned to bristle back in Amherst. Because the same locales where we found The Valley Advocate, the same spots we’d go skateboarding, the places we’d hang out afterward, running into non-skate friends from school—those were the same places frequented by our, or my, arch-enemies: Christian proselytizers. You’d be sitting with your friends outside Bart’s, the ice-cream parlor next to the Unitarian Church, and they’d just appear, clean-cut men and women not that much older than us, asking if we believed, if we were saved, if we wanted to be saved.

No, no, and no! We were smart (alecs), we were decently educated (this was Amherst, after all), and we were boisterous. We argued, and they argued back; we dunked on them, and they took it in stride. We could have walked or skated away at any time, but we didn’t. We wanted to cow (abunga) them as badly as they wanted to save us. But neither side ever gave any ground.

At the time, and in that place, I never felt extra resistance to their efforts because I was Jewish. Those street preachers came at us because we were kids—dirty, loud-talking, rebellious kids clearly in need of salvation—and could hardly have known I was the solitary Jew was among them.

Still, I felt it—this obstinate pressure to convert. And with that came the sense, too, that the pressure could come at any time, from anywhere, even the places I was most comfortable, among the people I called my friends. I hadn’t had much of a Jewish education, had no Jewish friends, had declared myself an atheist and refused a bar mitzvah, but I knew about the Holocaust, pogroms, antisemitism, and about fundamentalist Christians’ increasing attempts to make use of Jews, and of Israel, to bring about the lunatic prophecies of their holy book’s disastrous final chapters. I was not having any of it.

But when I moved to Virginia, the pressure only increased. I was, as far as I knew, the only Jew in my high school, which meant that as far as anyone knew, there were no Jews there at all. Which is how it had always been. Which meant open Christianity ruled. At my younger brother’s band banquet, the band leader’s pre-meal prayers started out generic, then thanked God, then Jesus; my brother, my mom, and I stared at one another in disbelief. When I happened to mention to a friend that I was Jewish, he said, “Wait, didn’t you guys kill Jesus?”² By the time my principal announced that a substitute teacher would be giving the convocation, I was prepared: Isn’t he a minister? I asked. Will he be mentioning God and Jesus? He will, the principal said. The community expects it. I warned her my family, including my grandparents and my uncle, would be in the audience, that we were part of the community, and that we would appreciate it if he did not talk about Jesus.

He did not talk about Jesus.

So this is my legacy as a Jew: visceral, instinctual resistance to the forces of Christianity. My great-grandparents came here, at the very end of the 19th century, from Lithuania, the cradle of Hasidism, and almost immediately gave up their hats and beards, embraced American capitalism and deal-making, and—on the side of the family that was more successful—started eating shellfish. But they did not convert, they did not succumb. They were part of Jewish communities, which surely made that resistance easier, but I don’t have that—and I don’t particularly want it. I often find other Jews pretty damn annoying, which is of course a very Jewish way to feel. And so that’s the kind of Jew I am: an atheist Jew, a Jew who doesn’t really like Jews, a Jew who married a Taiwanese Buddhist, a pig-eating Jew, a Jew who eats shrimp but mostly just the heads, a Jew who really has a hard time giving a shit about Israel these days even though he knows a few people there, a Jew who finds no great comfort in following tradition for tradition’s sake, a Jew who is looking forward to making latkes and lighting Hanukkah candles, a nerdy Jew who kinda-sorta wishes he’d had a bar mitzvah just so he could’ve spent more time learning another language, a paranoid Jew who figures he’s going to have to flee this country at gunpoint and kinda-sorta hopes that time comes before he’s too old to reinvent himself in Denmark, a blue-eyed, light-haired, non-swarthy Jew, a Jew so attuned to saving money he wrote a column called the Frugal Traveler, a Jew who never thinks about being Jewish except when he feels like it or when he can find a way to make it benefit him, a Jew who never wishes he wasn’t Jewish because that doesn’t make sense because you don’t actually get to choose these things, a Jew who wants to just live his life like any other middle-aged American man but also wants to be recognized as so, so very special and wonderful—in other words, recognized as a Jew. One Jew, one million fucking opinions. But also: not a Christian. Never ever.

Which is an extremely long-winded way of saying we don’t do Christmas in my house. No tree, no Santa—that’s how the Christians get in, through the metaphorical chimney. That’s how they make you think their traditions are normal, the default, just the regular ol’ way of doing things in these here United States. And maybe that is normal here. But I’m not normal, and my family never has been. My legacy is nonconformity, and that’s a tradition I’ll gladly honor and pass down to my daughters.

And that’s not to say I don’t like Christmas! In fact, I like it: the festive decorations on suburban homes and throughout the city; the crazy deep beautiful catalog of music, including the greatest holiday song of all time, “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas”³; the cozy, elaborate Christmas Day dinners we have with friends; the cookies, the cookies, the cookies; and, of course, The Princess Switch. I may not allow it in our household, but I’m no Grinch: Christmas is fun.

But it’s fun for me in the same way as, say, Songkran or Eid or Bastille Day—it’s someone else’s special time that I’m lucky enough to participate in, and as I’ve written before, I’m more comfortable that way. I know how to be an outsider looking in, and there’s no better time to peer in through those frost-edged windows than Christmas.

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The first full-length episode of The Simpsons was, of course, all about Christmas. It’s insane to summarize: While out Christmas shopping, Bart sneaks off to get a tattoo, and when Marge discovers it she has to spend her gift budget to get it removed, but she thinks it’s okay because Homer will be getting his Christmas bonus, except he doesn’t, so he has to take a job as a department-store Santa, but even that doesn’t pay enough, so on Christmas Eve he and Bart go off to the dog track and bet all their cash on a greyhound named Santa’s Little Helper, who loses, so they lose, except that Santa’s Little Helper’s owner kicks the dog out, and the Simpsons adopt him, and it’s a merry Christmas all around.

When the show aired, I don’t remember it bothering me—either I was so overwhelmed with excitement for this new cartoon or I’d already come to recognize that Christians dominated this nation, and this was only to be expected. But still, it doesn’t bother me today. Christmas is a fact of life, the most American of holidays⁴, and to wish it were otherwise is crazy-making. One Jew I’m not: a crazy Jew.

But you know who is a crazy Jew? Krusty the Clown. Born Herschel Krustovsky, Krusty is a mainstay of the Simpsons’ world—a manic-depressive chaos agent and world-class entertainer desperate for adulation. Clearly a Jew! But it wasn’t revealed until the season three episode “Like Father, Like Clown,” a parody of The Jazz Singer in which we learn not only that Krusty is Jewish but that he’s estranged from his rabbi father, Hyman, who disapproved of young Herschel’s forays into comedy. Bart and Lisa endeavor to reconcile the two, and succeed by quoting Sammy Davis Jr. to Hyman: “The Jews are a swinging bunch of people. I mean, I've heard of persecution, but what they went through is ridiculous. But the great thing is, after thousands of years of waiting and holding on and fighting, they finally made it.” Obviously a winning argument! Father and son are reunited—saved, perhaps?—and Hyman hits Krusty in the face with a cream pie.

The best part of this is no one tries to convert the Krustovskys. In the fantasyland of the Simpsons, they are allowed to exist just as they are, two deeply dysfunctional Jews wrapped up in their own toxic worlds of religion and showbiz. At least one of them is adored by millions of American children, none of whom, as far as we know, write letters asking him to accept Jesus as his lord and savior. Krusty gets what all Jews—or at least this Jew—want, which is to be an incredibly screwed-up person without being nudged, noodged, hectored, and harassed to become something he’s not, for no good reason at all. And isn’t that the true meaning of Christmas?

No? Well, a yid can dream. 🪨🪨🪨

It’s Good and I Like It

Notes

1. I’m not italicizing the Simpsons because at this point it feels like I’m talking not about the show but about the family.

2. When I confronted him about this two decades later, he couldn’t remember but was embarrassed. He was part Jewish, too, he said.

3. How has this not been made into a movie?

4. Tough titties, Fourth of July.

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