Queer Christmas and Other Holiday Havoc
Singing from Behind: A Gay Chanukah / Christmas Story
Winter holiday time of the year is here again.
Probably my favorite of all holidays is Christmas. As an elementary school teacher, I marked the passage of holidays with creative but educational bulletin boards. Even though I retired from teaching some 27 years ago, marking the holidays is still important to me.
My condo over the years sported not only Christmas and Chanukah decorations, but also New Year’s, Valentine’s Day, Easter, July 4th, and Halloween, as well as winter, spring, summer, and fall.
I have written previously about Christmas with my first partner’s family and Grandma Anna and her sisters Clara and Frieda.
“Christmas at Gregory and Michael’s” has for over 40 years been an important part of both of our nieces and nephews (there are 12) as well as our great nieces and nephews (there are another 12) and God-children (there are 5.) Besides the decorations, they looked forward to the gifts, the cookies, and to decorating gingerbread people and gingerbread houses.
For my family it was especially special since being Jewish, their families didn’t acknowledge Christmas so their GAY UNCLES, also known as GUNCLES helped to fill the gap! Now that Gregory passed and I am getting older the celebrations are smaller and sometimes do not take place at all.
For the last 30+ years, the Chicago holiday season never began until the first Saturday in December at Roger’s annual Christmas Party. To this day, with one year off when Roger was in Italy and one year due to COVID, one is always able to count on a delicious homemade dinner, home-baked cookies, fond friends (some seen only once a year at this event,) and a festive atmosphere filled with love.
On the “perfect each year” fresh Christmas tree decorated with old fashioned lights, there are ornaments from his family that go back generations and from his many friends that go back a lifetime.
His home has added touches of Christmas everywhere. There is a bit on tinsel on top of a picture frame and small red and green foil boxes held in the arms of a Plaster Putti in the bathroom.
There is a snow globe on the dining room table that plays music and a forest of various types of miniature trees on the shelf above his kitchen counter. On a folding table in a corner of the living room there is his family’s antique nativity scene and in the bedroom a second, foil Christmas Tree very much in the style of Charlie Brown, with a revolving variously colored spot light.
Everywhere you look, there is love and Christmas and thirty or so people enjoying their time with Roger in the big sense of home which he has created in his small apartment.
Another tradition at the party celebrates Roger’s Jewish friends. In the beginning of this party, going back at least thirty years, the Jews got to put the lights on the Christmas tree since they never got to do it in their own home. But based on a lack of experience with things Christmas, they usually did a very poor job of it. After many years of having to rearrange the lights after the party, Roger decided that this part of the tradition had to go! Now when we arrive, the tree is already decorated.
Sharing Hanukkah dreidels, “gelt” in the form of gold foil wrapped chocolate coins, and the lighting of the Menorah have continued. By now the non-Jews have learned the blessing over the lighting of the candles and joyously join in the singing.
Once as I squeezed in to join the singing, Lisa tried to make room for me but so many people were grouped around the Menorah that I told her, “I’ll just sing from behind.” Giggling, she said that my comment sounded like the title of a Gay short story: “Singing from Behind.”
This then is that story.
This story is a response to the Prism & Pen writing prompt, Queer Christmas and Other Holiday Havoc.
