sarah HANNAH gómez

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This post is inspired by this post at Racialicious. The comment I posted there appears at the bottom of this page.

I don’t know about you, but I had the best Christmas this year.

I grew up vaguely celebrating the holiday, since my father is Catholic but he and my mother raised me and my sister Jewish. Like, we didn’t really give gifts to each other on Hanukkah but rather waited until the 25th (we did that up until this year, actually, when my parents were out of town and my sister was with her husband’s family), we would sometimes remember to buy a tree (and they smell amazing, so I’m always down for a Christmas tree), and I’ve been to Mass a handful of times in my life. But this December 25th was particularly awesome because I was alone in my house, I slept late, I took a bubble bath, I watched a movie, I did a puzzle, I read a book, and in general I did all the lovely, lazy things I always want to do when I have the day off from work, but this time I didn’t really have any chores to do or errands to run, so I got to do them all, instead of just some.

I don’t really understand Christmas anyway. I know it’s the reappropriation of Jesus’ birthday to a more convenient time coinciding with the winter solstice, but I don’t really understand how a jolly old man who fits into chimneys got added into the mix. And of all the people I know who celebrate Christmas, both the religious ones and the non-religious ones, the holiday is mostly about tone-deaf people singing aesthetically unpleasing music, cookies, and presents. That’s all fine, because that’s just how it goes in America, and other holidays have gone that way, too. And in a way, I think the fact that Christmas is forced on everyone makes it even less religious and more just a national pastime, like watching the Superbowl or giving each other Valentines. But if you happen to actively practice a religion that doesn’t care so much about Jesus, people stop seeing Christmas as that American consumerist holiday and try to tell you how religiously significant it still is, and how you must have your own Christmas, like Hanukkah! Because they come at the same time of year, so Hanukkah is totally the Jewish Christmas, right?

Except it’s not, because Hanukkah isn’t even canon; it’s just extra. And fun as it is to have a holiday that basically requires you to eat fried food, it’s not all that important aside from that. If you want to say that Christmas has a huge religious significance, the “equivalent” has to be Passover for the Jews. I hate it when people think that everyone has to have a Christmas, first because it makes Christmas the norm and other holidays the other, and because it mistakenly assumes that Christmas has a religious significance that for most people it has lost, and because it assumes that all religions are the same. And in a way they are, but I think they’re the same in that their mythologies all have some essential truths or storylines that are similar, not because they all celebrate a virgin birth by going to the mall every day in December.

This is all a diatribe of how little I care for or about Christmas, because I don’t feel like it’s a holiday that has any tie to my personality, my religion, or my budget. I’m also realizing that I just don’t care about most holidays, period. I abhor finding something to do on New Year’s Eve, because personally, I find it rather stupid. At midnight the calendar is going to change. Well, newsflash, but that happens every midnight. Yesterday was a different day, too. Also I hate any holiday that purports to be about inherent, incumbent personal change or that requires you to have a boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife/whatever or that has all these social rules tied to it about what you can wear and how much you have to drink, etc. Usually I watch movies on New Year’s Eve and fall asleep before midnight. But I feel obligated to do something because we’re all socialized that it is the correct thing to do. And that is, I think, the problem with Christmas as well. I mean, I participate in Secret Santas and all, too, because it’s easier to do so than to explain why I’m not going to, and because it’s always nice to get a present. And if you really feel as if Christmas is personally significant, whether it’s because of religion, the fun family dinner, getting presents, or because you somehow enjoy how crowded the mall is after Thanksgiving, then you should celebrate it. But I think Christmas and other holidays, at least in the United States, are more about socialization than anything else. We are obligated to participate, whether or not it goes with our religious, personal, financial, or social identities, because that’s the way society is set up. Our lives revolve around moving from one holiday to another. It would just be nice if we tried a little harder to see that not all holidays are created equal, and not all people care about all holidays equally.

And here is the comment I left at Racialicious :

I work at a children’s museum, and from November to February, we have various “festivals of friendship,” where we center an afternoon around a holiday or cultural celebration and have various folk art crafts, musical/dance performances, story readings, etc. We started with a luau, then we had Hanukkah, then Christmas, and next on the list are MLK Day, Chinese New Year, and Carnaval. I think it’s a nice start, even if it is missing things like Diwali and Eid, and even if Hanukkah is a fairly unimportant holiday religiously (Passover is far more important, I would say, and even in terms of kids’ celebrations, Purim would be far more entertaining). But I do have people wondering if, because I’m black, I’m going to be celebrating Kwanzaa (our daily craft on Sunday was an mkeka mat), which confuses them, because I’m also Jewish and “celebrate” Hanukkah, and I’ve never met a single person who celebrates Kwanzaa. Not to mention, things like decorating in “Christmas colors” and “Hanukkah colors” (I don’t consider Hanukkah to really have colors, since the ones we use just seem to be based on the fact that those are the colors of the Israeli flag) or baking Kwanzaa cakes are all ways of making other holidays seem like Christmas. It’s especially funny given that most people, when only talking about Christmas, bemoan its lack of religious basis nowadays, since it’s mostly about consumerism, and it’s not as if Jesus brings you presents to celebrate your birthday, so it’s already become muddled with other mythologies and traditions and holidays.

My favorite thing about the holidays, which was also my least favorite thing, was the other day at work when we made candy cane reindeer, and four Orthodox Jewish boys wanted to participate. For one positive thing, theirs were the most creative and interesting reindeer, probably because for them, it was just a craft, not something that had to end up resembling Rudolph to be correctly made, and for the negative thing, they weren’t sure if they could eat the candycanes, because the box didn’t say anything about whether it was kosher. I had to go and google the box and call Target, and ended up getting no information and assuming they were not kosher, because they were cheap, and cheap candy companies can’t usually afford to be kosher. I would say those boys are an example of what inclusiveness should be about–participating in a “seasonal,” holiday-specific activity just to have fun and learn a little, but also an example of how inclusiveness fails when the dominant culture won’t make concessions. I wish someone would be as willing to dress up for Purim or celebrate Diwali as these boys were to make Rudolphs that they couldn’t even eat.

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As of 4pm today, I took my last final and essentially stopped being an undergrad. My degree will have the official graduation date on it, and grades aren’t in, but I’m not going to commencement, and I’m pretty sure I pulled a 4.0 this semester, so as far as I’m concerned, I am a baccalaureate.

I don’t particularly care about any of that, but I would like to say that I took four literature courses this semester and still managed to read 26.5 books not for school. I say half because I’m still in the middle of two others, but I’ve read about 300 pages of them in total. I’ve never really been that great at managing my time, but apparently I am now, because the only thing I sucked at this semester was a social life. Otherwise, I read a spectacular amount of books, did all my homework, caught two colds, got e.coli, held down three jobs for approximately 35 hours a week, took 15 units of class, worked out two or three days a week, got a decent score on the GRE, applied to grad schools, started a weekly volunteer job, and still stayed current with way too many television shows. All this while learning to become a morning person and scarcely sleeping fewer than seven hours a night. (I didn’t do a lot of writing, but I wasn’t trying to. I mostly thought and outlined, and now I’m excited to have the time to dedicate to writing.) So, that being said, anyone who says they don’t have time to read is full of shit. Sorry.

Over the summer, I decided to cut out most of the meat that I eat. It was part of my general diet plan that I outlined on this blog when I started, and it went along with other self improvements, like exercising more and cooking more. After gaining weight my freshman year of college, I decided I should make a conscientious effort to only eat meat at one meal a day, rather than having, say, a turkey sandwich for lunch and chicken and pasta for dinner. But even that didn’t seem like enough when I weighed 140 pounds (141 is the official beginning of overweight BMI for my height, and I lie about my height, so really I was already overweight, though not at all in a dangerous way), plus I had just watched “Food, Inc,” so I decided that I should only eat meat every couple of weeks, and then only eat it if it was organic, kosher, local, grass-fed, or something like that that indicates it’s not the average animal shot up with drugs and hormones and fed with corn and shoved into a dirty slaughterhouse. For anyone who has seen that movie, I will say that, as someone who has always been grossed out by raw meat (another reason to be a vegetarian), I was struck by how much I wanted to eat the organic chicken that I saw killed, plucked, and cut up on screen; it was just so fresh- and healthy- and yummy-looking. Organic really is better, and you can literally see why. It’s part of my general campaign to feel more personally responsible for the life I lead, because it’s very easy to sign CREDO petitions online and a lot harder to actually reduce my carbon footprint (I now only take elevators if I’m going up really high, if my asthma is acting up, or if people are already using it; I annoy my parents to death when I dig things out of the trash can and put them in the recycle bin; I take the bus to school since my car died) and take personal responsibility for keeping at least my part of the world as healthy as possible.

So, aside from Thanksgiving weekend, when I had a lot of delicious French food and Thanksgiving food for four days, I really only have meat twice a month, and it’s gotten to the point that I do feel sick if I have it more often than that. I don’t feel the need to be anything more than a flexitarian, because I don’t not eat meat because I think eating animals is wrong; I just don’t eat meat because I think the American way of eating animals is wrong, and because I would rather be lean and healthy than obese and sick. I also don’t want to never eat meat, because I like to travel, and sometimes your only option is meat, especially when you are also lactose intolerant, like I am. Plus, since American meat is far nastier and far less healthy than other meat, I don’t feel as if I am eating piles of grease and corn and drugs when I eat meat in other countries. Also, I have a big problem with snobby vegetarians, because, even though there are some “traditional cultures” whose diet is naturally vegetarian, there are plenty of others that get to eat meat a lot, or they get to eat it as a treat, or they are really gracious to tourists and travelers and offer meat even if it’s expensive, and I don’t want to be rude if I can be polite without getting sick. Vegetarianism with complete nutrition is a privilege that Americans have, and it shouldn’t be imposed on people who either don’t have access to vegetarianism or who live in a place where the alternative to vegetarianism doesn’t increase greenhouse gases or contribute to monoculture. Americans should be vegetarians, vegans, or flexitarians because our lifestyle is basically the asshole lifestyle of the world, but other people shouldn’t necessarily have to accommodate that.

In high school, I hadn’t quite developed my ideas of being a conscientious world citizen (not that I’m so great at it now), but I did believe, as I believe now, that, in a general understanding of things–slaughterhouse practices aside–there should be no moral or health reason not to eat meat. I think it’s part of the food chain (lions aren’t vegetarians, and PETA doesn’t go yelling at them), and certainly protein and iron are good for you. I’ve always been a sort of picky eater, and in high school I was still a picky eater, especially about meat. I don’t like it if it looks slightly funny, or if it’s too pink, or if it’s too dry, or whatever, so I’ve never been a big meat lover, because it’s easier just to say no to it than to be that girl who picks around her food. (I’ve since decided that being a foodie is more interesting than eating pickily, but I’m still happy with my vegetarianism.) But when my high school class went to Kenya, I wanted to immerse myself in it, and I think the best way to learn a different culture is through food–eating, cooking with people, sitting around in a kitchen and watching people cook, visiting a farm…all of which I did while I was there–so I was happy to at least try everything we were served. I didn’t like goat, but I ate it the first time and just passed the next few times it was offered. The beef was tougher than the beef I was used to, but I ate it.

There were many people in my group who were vegetarians, and they would get really demanding and offended when they were offered meat. We had a personal cook who once made us grilled cheese with ham because everyone was complaining about being hungry. It wasn’t a mealtime, but he made us a huge plate of sandwiches. I really hate ham, but I ate it, because I was hungry, and because it had been offered to me. The vegetarians threw a fit, so the cook had to make more cheese-only sandwiches, and a lot of the first batch of sandwiches went to waste, because there weren’t enough non-vegetarians to eat them.

I totally understand that if you have a diet in which you never eat meat, it might make you sick to all of a sudden eat an entire animal. But you can pretty quickly train your body to adjust to a diet, and I doubt any of these kids would have had anything more than slight indigestion, if anything. And the fact that they were so rude about it really bothered me. If you don’t want to be a part of something new or different, don’t travel. And don’t try to impose your privilege on someone who doesn’t have it. It makes you seem like an asshole.

This is why I am not a complete vegetarian (Michael Pollan calls it flexitarian) and why I’m not a vegan, even though that’s probably the best diet for me, since I can’t have a lot of dairy or a lot of meat without feeling ill. That is also why I would never switch to keeping kosher, even though I can see some value in kosher style, and even though a lot of kosher food is just more delicious than its non-kosher counterpart. You can’t travel if you have a closed mind or a closed stomach. And travel isn’t limited to actual travel. I would say the concept also transfers to being a world citizen and to being a respectful person in general.

**I think maybe I sound much more high and mighty than Michael Pollan does when he talks about this stuff, and also the word “American” appears too much in this post. Sorry.

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