The Meaning of Christmas, and Hot Tom and Jerry

~open for a surprise~

“Now one time it comes on Christmas, and in fact…” well, in fact it is nowhere NEAR Christmas, but everybody in my neighborhood went full Christmas the day after Thanksgiving this year, so whatever I am leaning in.

(Just a little taste of Dancing Dan’s Christmas to whet your appetite.)

Noah and I don’t celebrate Christmas together particularly, which is to say we do the American Jewish Not Christmas Celebration of getting dim sum. For the past few years, we have gone to a dim sum palace at the bottom of Sunset Park, where we are invariably seated at a table with other Jewish Gays who are not visiting their blood relations.

Despite thinking of myself as essentially “more Jewish than not” at this point, I grew up Quaker, and Quakers are Christians, despite what a kid at Christian summer camp told me before he pushed me down a hill back in 2006. And so, in the way that all Americans who are Christian, but say that they “aren’t really religious” celebrate Christmas, I grew up celebrating Christmas.

When my dad was alive, and before my estrangement from my mom, I celebrated Christmas with my parents, with the network of extended family and friends that I grew up around. For me, as for most people, it was an excuse to have parties, and my parents’ friends, who were predominately teachers, finally had some time off. I liked to see people, and to eat constantly, little snackies everywhere. Even now that I don’t go down south anymore, I still would see whoever was in town, and my friends in grad school would visit their parents in New York, and so it’s always been a few weeks where you get to see people more than usual. This year, it will be a few weeks of seeing less people than usual. So what’s left? What then, without that spirit of sharing, and Family, and many many snacks, is the meaning of Christmas?

Well, it’s an excuse to be terribly, horribly, gloriously tacky, and no, I am not talking about “ugly christmas sweaters.” Sorry, those have been played out for years. Ironic excess is not camp get it through your skulls. Folks are so caught up in being sad about Not Seeing People, that they are forgetting what is truly, the best part of Christmas: awful, truly wretched decorations. Christmas, All-American Christmas, that’s camp baby.

I saw this picture in a Zillow post that was going around Twitter and it spoke directly to my soul. It was so horrible, so heinous, so unceasing that of course I loved it. Yes, the real star of the house is the cursed bathroom with a toilet on a pedestal made of river rocks, but the decor is so…. spectacular.

There are a lot of ways to make something tacky. Sometimes, an object just is innately tacky. Those objects are, of course, some of the finest things in existence. Christmas has a lot of stuff like that. Pickle ornaments: tacky. That fringe you put on trees: very tacky. Bows: mostly tacky. My dad was a premiere gift-wrapper, and this is something that I inherited from him, and the trick to wrapping a gift well is simple. Why use no bow when you could use one? And then, why not use three? Why not use two, or even three kinds of wrapping paper, just to spice things up? This has always felt like the spirit of Christmas to me: excess, as much as you can. Too many bows, that you take off the present, and put back in the bag for next year. Saving the “good wrapping paper” to really jazz somebody else’s gift up.

But I digress. This house. I was talking about this house.

The thing that makes this house so amazing is that all of the decorations are Tasteful Christmas Decorations, which are my least favorite kind (my dad was a frequent recipient of my spiels about how much I detest white christmas lights, (they should all be colored, and there should always be a lot of them)). But the sheer volume of Tasteful Christmas Decorations renders them completely heinous.

There is no surface upon which the eye can rest, it is drawn, relentlessly, from one Santa to another, and from Nutcracker to Drummer Boy. The walls are covered as well, with paintings that say “A CATHOLIC LIVES HERE” and the paintings too are sedate enough, (for Catholic stuff), but the number of them means that you are always confronted with the last dinner, or the holy virgin, or something. It’s overwhelming, it’s exhausting. It is, dare I say it, the spirit of Christmas?

You look at this house, this monument to excess, and you feel tired, like you need to go home, take a nap, just rest your eyes. You feel grateful for your small, and sedate normal house, even in its filth. You come out of the claustrophobic chaos and you are suddenly so glad to be alone. The experience of looking at these pictures, and then not looking at these pictures is how I felt at the end of every “holiday season” when I would visit family. Overwhelmed, and grateful that I do not need to experience that level of Joy, Conviviality, and Good Feeling all the time. I appreciate how mundane and peaceful much of my life is, how great it is not to worry that a dog will knock an ornament off the tree, how nice it is not to see my relatives, who I love, or whatever, but who I do not need to see for three entire days when I am supposed to be pleasant the whole time.

We can still create this feeling for ourselves. Even in a pandemic! You can decorate your houses to look absolutely terrible, and put up tacky little decorations, and create a fire hazard with a tree if you want to. You can run up your electric bill, and eat mediocre cookies. You can do all of that. You can even cover your lawn with the dreaded, loathesome, inflatables (though I beseech you: do not). And then, as soon as you are tired, you can go to your actual bedroom (not your childhood bedroom!!) and you can lie down, and you can clean up in the morning and then this Christmas thing is over, and honestly? That’s the best part of Christmas, is the relief of it being done. And it will be. It all will be, sooner than we think, but not soon enough.

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If you want to celebrate a little, here’s a recipe. I’ll probably make this, and remember that I don’t actually enjoy Hot Tom and Jerry all that much, but they remind me of my dad, so I drink one, and I appreciate it. To drink one makes me happy, to drink two is more than I like, and that’s that on the Holidays.

To make Hot Tom and Jerry:

• Eggs (maybe 3 if you are doing it just for your immediate family), separated

• Cinnamon

• Nutmeg

• Allspice

• A bit of cloves

• Confectioners sugar

• Rum (light rum)

• Brandy

• Coffee

You will need a double boiler for this! If you don’t have one, use a bowl that isn’t touching the water above a saucepan.

In the double boiler, cook the yolks with a splash of brandy, and maybe a bit of milk, stirring constantly to prevent scrambles. Add the spices. No measurements, lol. You want the SMALLEST amount of cloves. Just a touch! Add powdered sugar with the spices.

Basically, the way this recipe works is you make a VERY powerfully flavored custard, and then you whip the egg whites and add the custard to that, so you want the flavor of the base to be overwhelming, because it will be diluted. Keep this in mind.

Anyway, as my dad says, “add the spices until the mixture is about the color of mud just a tad of the cloves—more of the other stuff (much more)+sugar”

Once the yolk mixture is cooked take it from the heat. It should be quite sweet and intensely spiced. The powdered sugar should all be dissolved. Again, the color of mud.

Beat the egg whites until stiff.

When the yolk mixture is cooled to the touch, fold it into the whites.

To make a hot tom and jerry:

Pour 1/2 oz brandy and 1 oz light rum into the bottom of a small coffee cup. Put in a nice sized scoop of tom and jerry fluff. Pour the coffee through the fluff. You don’t want to melt it all, that’s gross, but you do want it to be a bit incorporated. You will probably want to stir it a bit with your finger (or a spoon I guess).

Drink it quickly, the fluff gets weird the longer it sits with the coffee. It’s good, but it is BAD if it sits around for a while.

To do it my family’s traditional way: drink hot tom and jerry, read Dancing Dan’s Christmas, you’ve done it, you have Celebrated.