How to Spell Chanukah...And Other Holiday Dilemmas by Emily Franklin

pointed that damn finger he would spend his life pointing at me, and dragged me into the Volare, where we sped off into the night to Sibley Memorial Hospital, an emergency room filled with the wreckage of all the miserable individuals Christmas Eve brings, each of them destroyed outside and in by this holiday my father wanted so badly to make his own.
    T HERE IS NO moral here—as in, this is what happens when you try to be someone you are not. The nurse did call the police, believing my sister’s fall to have been not what my parents named it but child abuse. Who puts a child on a refrigerator? My mother stepped up in front of her husband when it was clear that the line of questioning was more than simple procedure.
    â€œThis really is not as it seems,” I remember her saying over and over again.
    My father was angry, but for the first time I saw him rendered unable to show it. “It sounds strange, but it’s a tradition we have,” he said between clenched teeth.
    At the end of it all, my sister was most upset by the socks they put on her hands so that she wouldn’t scratch at her stitches—ten of them, in her chin. We had all watched as the doctor sewed her up, her impossibly young face, her eyes fluttering open and closed, as wrecked as my mother’s old cracked dolls. We drove back to our house in silence and I, me, because now this story is mine, thought of my guinea pig, and how I had let him down. Forever, I thought, our first night of separateness would come between us.
    T WO YEARS LATER we got a dog—a cairn terrier we called Toto, if you can believe it—and GP lost his allure. At my mother’s suggestion— you have to walk and feed and brush Toto now!— I donated GP to our school, and he lived among the snakes and gerbils as he had in that pet store, which is now a Brazilian restaurant. The denim store is now part of a Whole Foods. How could that animal have been so important to me one moment, and then the next, nothing?
    I can’t understand it, as I am now a person who rarely goes anywhere without my own dog, a springer spaniel who I would throw myself in front of a car for, run into that burning building that so terrified me as a child, to save. After that incident, Christmas became more a part of our lives. Perhaps my mother could no longer fight it. Still we lit the candles each Chanukah, but Christmas Day grew larger, to the point where our Jewish relatives would come for what they soon termed Christmakah. There would be ham and glogg and fruitcake: Who didn’t want to try on something they had spent their lives outside?
    That’s what it always felt like: like trying something on. But what was real? I grew more troubled not by Christmas, per se, but by what I would do with it. Out of that childhood, I went on to Brandeis University and then to teach Jewish American literature and to write fiction out of that tradition. Is it some strange Hegelian dialectic? My parents gave me many gifts, but none of them were about being Jewish in the religious sense of the word. Our Jewishness was everything my family was not: it was quiet, celebrated without ceremony, not easily held to.
    When I look back at it now, I see it less in the festival of lights, the nights our family was stitched together tipping one candle to another, two equal flames from one, proof that there is always enough—love? light?—to go around, but more in the funerals of my great-grandparents and great-aunts, and then traveling down and down to my grandparents and uncles: a gathering of people, sharing food and memories and, as it grows closer and closer, unbearable grief.
    And yet Christmas is part of my family history now. What will it mean for my children, when and if I have them? What will I pass on? Because somewhere in a child’s room—mine?—there will be a cabinet, a box, a trunk stashed far back in a closet that will have my mother’s terrifying dolls, my