Chrismukkah Eve

Michelle and I just got back from our Chrismukkah evening... Chinese food and church. Michelle was feeling blue. In years past, we'd visit her family in Indiana for Christmas... but this year, for the first time in many, we didn't make it. Michelle felt strongly that her new business needed to stay open this busy week. Michelle hoped for a last minute buying surge. It's been a tough first year for her ceramics studio and gallery. Retail is new to Michelle... and selling doesn't come naturally to her. Meanwhile, I too was very busy shipping out Chrismukkah orders right up until noon today. After a few changes of mind, Michelle decided she did want to attend the evening candle lighting service at the nearby UCC Church, the denomination she was raised in. We all put on our nice clothing and headed out to dinner. Chinese food on Christmas Eve, even if only mediocre Montana Chinese food, is such a familiar ritual for me and it put me in the right frame of mind for the evening. After dinner,we headed over to Pilgrim Congregational Church, which Minna knows from attending "Kindermusik" each week. Michelle enjoyed the service, and I enjoyed her enjoying it, but feeling a bit like a die-hard Yankees fan attending a Red Sox game. We live in a subdivision here in Bozeman and there is a neighborhood tradition each Christmas Eve of putting luminaries out in front of each house. The idea is to get the whole neighborhood to participate in the big light show. I'm generally reluctant to participate in such wholesome organized behavior, but this being our first year living here, and not wanting to alienate all the neighbors, I begrudgingly complied... but with one modification. I put out 9 luminary bags and then piled up a foot tall mound of snow and placed the center bag on it. I'm pretty sure our neighbors didn't notice... but my little act of resistance to conformity and assimilation seemed like the perfect pre-Hanukkah symbol for this evening. Now it's time to start wrapping the presents in preparation for tomorrow "double header." All in all it turned out to be the perfect Chrismukkah Eve... a nice balance for our multifaith home.

3 Days To Chrismukkah

Wow. That was a wild rush. Since my last post on December 14th, life has been tetering on the brink of insanity. Yes, it's Chrismukkah time here at Chrismukkah ground zero. I've just returned from the daily drop to Fed Ex Kinkos and the post office... both of which were nearly deserted. Even the procrastinators know it's too late now. Bozeman is a college town and about half our population has cleared out for the week. Parking spaces are once again abundant and 2 feet of snow has turned to slush. Last Friday, Michelle and I flew to New York for the weekend at the invitation of The Today Show. Minna stayed at home with Nana. A transit strike was threatened for Friday, but thankfully, the union postponed that for a few days. Even so, things started out a little rocky when we arrived at LaGuardia to find that Northwest Airlines had misplaced our luggage somewhere between Minneapolis and New York. Even so, It was first class all the way. Limo pickup at the airport, check into the grand old Essex House Hotel on Central Park South, told the bell captain to expect our luggage, and then cab downtown for a meeting with a big publishing house intereted in doing my cookbook. After the meeting, we had a perfect Chinese meal at a noodle house in the village. Living in Montana, decent Chinese is something I miss more than anything else. We called the hotel to see if our bags had shown up (they hadn't) and then walked over to Saks Fifth Ave to buy new outfits to wear the next day. Did you know that the entry level for a sweater at Saks is $400... cashmere of course. With shoppings bags full and charge accounts near their limit, we headed back uptown to the Essex House to meet publicist Edna K for Absolute and tonics. Our lost bags finally arrived around midnight and we went to sleep relieved and relaxed. Our early morning call came too soon and we rushed down to the lobby and caught the limo down to Studio 1A. They ushered into make-up and then to the Green Room. There we waited for nearly 3 hours while they finished up the live broadcast and then set up to pre-record the Christmas day episode we were there for. All the other guests preceeded us... the "gift returns lady", the Brian Setzer Orchestra, the Mens and Boys Christmas Choir. Between each guest, the union crew took a 1/2 hour break. By the time Michelle and I to hit the soundstage, we were distracted, jittery from too much coffee and unfocused. Campbell Brown did the interview. I don't remember much of it. I don't normally get nervous in such situations, and I've done my fare share of on-camera interviews, but there's just something about The Today Show and having 3 huge NBC cameras sticking in your face. You may watch our "deer in headlights" performance this Sunday (12/25) morning. That is if we don't end up on the cutting room floor. After the taping, we were literally whisked out of the studio and into a crowd of "stage door" groupies. Some whacked out guy thrust a pad of paper and pen at us wanting an autograph. "Actress?" he said to Michelle. We jumped into the waiting limo and cruised back up to the Essex House. After changing clothes and checking out we made our way back down to Saks to return our outfits. Then we went in search of lunch, ending up at the far less popular "overflow" deli across the street from the tourist packed Carnegie Deli (the wait line was down the block.) After downing 5 inch thick hot pastrami sandwiches, we spent the remainder of the afternoon exploring the newly renovated Museum of Modern Art. Feet aching and eyes spinning, we met up with Neil, my old buddy from Jersey, for a quick cup of coffee at Starbucks on 57th. Neil headed down into the subway while Michelle and I cabbed down to Grand Central to catch the 5 PM to White Plains. Cousin Mark picked us up at the station and we had dinner at a fancy-schmancy restaurant in Scarsdale. The next morning Michael J. came over for a brunch of fresh bagels and lox. Another thing I really miss about New York. Before we had a chance to finish our second cup of coffee it was time to go. The car service honked and off we drove to LaGuardia. We checked in and happily allowed ourselves to be bumped up to first class. We spent the 6 hour flight drinking wine and reading the Sunday Times. When we landed in Bozeman, the temperature was 16 below. Back to reality I thought as I scraped the accumulated ice from the windshield. Monday morning was catch up day. We got the orders that had arrived in over the weekend out by mid afternoon. The rest of the week was spent balancing the phone interviews with packing and shipping. By the end of the week, It felt like I had spoken with the nearly every newspaper reporter in the country. Now it's feels like things are finally winding down. The orders are all out. The phone is no longer ringing off the hook. Only one more radio talk show to go. I'm really looking forward to Sunday... a day I understand is some kind of holiday.

11 Days to Chrismukkah

It's 10PM and I just got the last order of the day packed. Time for a glass of wine and tonights Daily Show. Did I say things were starting to wind down? Never mind. Today we had our busiest day of the year. We shipped well over 100 books and nearly a thousands cards. As 4 PM approached, in a panic, I called my mother out of her daily bridge game at the senior center so she could look after Minna while Michelle and I packed orders. Michelle saved the day, making it to both the post office and the airport Fed Ex drop off with seconds to spare before cutoff. Meanwhile, I took calls from so many reporters that my voice is nearly gone. Minna has been getting cranky... we're sure she's feeling our stress. We just keep reminding ourselves this is what we've wanted and that soon this will be behind us, and The surge in activity apparently was the result of a thing they did on us on some Boston TV show, and a story that hit the wire service on Associated Press. Frankly, I haven't seem any of this, but the phone was ringing off the hook, mostly from customers who didn't own computers or couldn't load our Flash site, and wanted to order the cookbook the old fashioned way. We leave for NYC Friday morning and tomorrow is our last day of shipping before Monday. Michelle still has hopes of finding the time to go shopping for a new outfit to wear on the show. I'm hoping we have some time after we're done with at taping to go ice skating at the Rockefeller Center rink. It's fun to be a tourist in NYC, even if you grew up there.

12 Days to Chrismukkah

Card sales seem to be winding down just as the so called "War on Christmas" is heating up. Somehow, even my silly little cookbook has been dragged into the fight. Nonetheless, or perhaps because of, it's selling like hot potato latkes. Food is the great cultural unifier... a demiliterized zone for the holiday. Today someone heard talk about us on our local NPR station. I got calls that we were the subject of the day this morning on a radio station in the Boston area. Google the word Chrismukkah and it seems to be everywhere. But who cares about the news when there's more important things to watch on TV! The other night, Chrismukkah was mentioned twice on Grey's Anatomy. This Thursday, the heavily hyped "Chrismukkah Bar Mitzahkah episode airs on the O.C. Then, Bravo's "100 Great Things About the Holidays" continues to be repeated with Chrismukkah in position #89. Finally, Michelle and I have been invited to be guests on "The Today Show" for their holiday special airing 12/25. I'm not sure what we'll be doing or what they'll be asking us, but we're excited about having the opportunity to fly to NYC all expense paid. In just another couple of weeks, we'll be back in holiday hibernations mode once again. Anyway, no time to blog when there's books waiting to be packed and shipped.

This Season's War Cry: Commercialize Christmas, or Else

By ADAM COHEN Religious conservatives have a cause this holiday season: the commercialization of Christmas. They're for it. The American Family Association is leading a boycott of Target for not using the words "Merry Christmas" in its advertising. (Target denies it has an anti-Merry-Christmas policy.) The Catholic League boycotted Wal-Mart in part over the way its Web site treated searches for "Christmas." Bill O'Reilly, the Fox anchor who last year started a "Christmas Under Siege" campaign, has a chart on his Web site of stores that use the phrase "Happy Holidays," along with a poll that asks, "Will you shop at stores that do not say 'Merry Christmas'?" This campaign - which is being hyped on Fox and conservative talk radio - is an odd one. Christmas remains ubiquitous, and with its celebrators in control of the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court and every state supreme court and legislature, it hardly lacks for powerful supporters. There is also something perverse, when Christians are being jailed for discussing the Bible in Saudi Arabia and slaughtered in Sudan, about spending so much energy on stores that sell "holiday trees." What is less obvious, though, is that Christmas's self-proclaimed defenders are rewriting the holiday's history. They claim that the "traditional" American Christmas is under attack by what John Gibson, another Fox anchor, calls "professional atheists" and "Christian haters." But America has a complicated history with Christmas, going back to the Puritans, who despised it. What the boycotters are doing is not defending America's Christmas traditions, but creating a new version of the holiday that fits a political agenda. The Puritans considered Christmas un-Christian, and hoped to keep it out of America. They could not find Dec. 25 in the Bible, their sole source of religious guidance, and insisted that the date derived from Saturnalia, the Roman heathens' wintertime celebration. On their first Dec. 25 in the New World, in 1620, the Puritans worked on building projects and ostentatiously ignored the holiday. From 1659 to 1681 Massachusetts went further, making celebrating Christmas "by forbearing of labor, feasting or in any other way" a crime. The concern that Christmas distracted from religious piety continued even after Puritanism waned. In 1827, an Episcopal bishop lamented that the Devil had stolen Christmas "and converted it into a day of worldly festivity, shooting and swearing." Throughout the 1800's, many religious leaders were still trying to hold the line. As late as 1855, New York newspapers reported that Presbyterian, Baptist and Methodist churches were closed on Dec. 25 because "they do not accept the day as a Holy One." On the eve of the Civil War, Christmas was recognized in just 18 states. Christmas gained popularity when it was transformed into a domestic celebration, after the publication of Clement Clarke Moore's "Visit from St. Nicholas" and Thomas Nast's Harper's Weekly drawings, which created the image of a white-bearded Santa who gave gifts to children. The new emphasis lessened religious leaders' worries that the holiday would be given over to drinking and swearing, but it introduced another concern: commercialism. By the 1920's, the retail industry had adopted Christmas as its own, sponsoring annual ceremonies to kick off the "Christmas shopping season." Religious leaders objected strongly. The Christmas that emerged had an inherent tension: merchants tried to make it about buying, while clergymen tried to keep commerce out. A 1931 Times roundup of Christmas sermons reported a common theme: "the suggestion that Christmas could not survive if Christ were thrust into the background by materialism." A 1953 Methodist sermon broadcast on NBC - typical of countless such sermons - lamented that Christmas had become a "profit-seeking period." This ethic found popular expression in "A Charlie Brown Christmas." In the 1965 TV special, Charlie Brown ignores Lucy's advice to "get the biggest aluminum tree you can find" and her assertion that Christmas is "a big commercial racket," and finds a more spiritual way to observe the day. This year's Christmas "defenders" are not just tolerating commercialization - they're insisting on it. They are also rewriting Christmas history on another key point: non-Christians' objection to having the holiday forced on them. The campaign's leaders insist this is a new phenomenon - a "liberal plot," in Mr. Gibson's words. But as early as 1906, the Committee on Elementary Schools in New York City urged that Christmas hymns be banned from the classroom, after a boycott by more than 20,000 Jewish students. In 1946, the Rabbinical Assembly of America declared that calling on Jewish children to sing Christmas carols was "an infringement on their rights as Americans." Other non-Christians have long expressed similar concerns. For decades, companies have replaced "Christmas parties" with "holiday parties," schools have adopted "winter breaks" instead of "Christmas breaks," and TV stations and stores have used phrases like "Happy Holidays" and "Season's Greetings" out of respect for the nation's religious diversity. The Christmas that Mr. O'Reilly and his allies are promoting - one closely aligned with retailers, with a smack-down attitude toward nonobservers - fits with their campaign to make America more like a theocracy, with Christian displays on public property and Christian prayer in public schools. It does not, however, appear to be catching on with the public. That may be because most Americans do not recognize this commercialized, mean-spirited Christmas as their own. Of course, it's not even clear the campaign's leaders really believe in it. Just a few days ago, Fox News's online store was promoting its "Holiday Collection" for shoppers. Among the items offered to put under a "holiday tree" was "The O'Reilly Factor Holiday Ornament." After bloggers pointed this out, Fox changed the "holidays" to "Christmases." Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

We love Richard Branson

Imitation being the most sincere form of flattery, we're extra flattered by Richard Branson's Virgin cell phone ad and his new chrismahanukwanzakah web site. Now in it's second season, Virgin has come up with a truly funny chrismahanukwanzakah promotion. http://www.chrismahanukwanzakah.com Mazeltov Richard and Merry Chrismahanukwanzakah to you Virgins!

Bravo - Great Things About the Holidays

Chrismukkah is #89 on Bravo TV's snarky show 100 Great Things About the Holidays. Ahead of He'Brew Beer even! Our icon - the raindeer with menorah is being featured today on their web site! http://www.bravotv.com/Events_&_Specials/ Cool yule!