A Christmas/Hanukkah Blog

As John Lennon once sang, "And so it is Christmas, for old and for young.....".

So I thought I'd write a little holiday blog to help promote the season.

I am probably one of many who have what I consider the advantage of diversity within the immediate family. I fell in love with a non-Jew who settled me down and brought a new variety to my religious teachings(along with a lot of love). Now we celebrate both Jewish and Christian traditions which we exposed to our young boys during their formative years. Most of the time my wife has to remind me of the Jewish holidays, I apologise for that folks. I guess I need to plug them all into my iPhone's calendar.

Holiday time gets expensive around the Schlenoff household. We've got to fork over presents for Hanukkah as well as Christmas. I keep telling my wife Geri that during the 8 days of Hanukkah each day is represented by a small token present. Apparently she's never received the memo. Hanukkah results in a fine written check for each one of the kiddies. There's also a lot of cooking going on, a lot of it by me, but in defense of our grown-up sons and daughters-in-law there was a recent resolution adopted to share hosting of the major holidays. I love it!!

We have a tradition to put the Christmas decorations on the tree (with a Jewish star at the top) while our immediate family eats steamed shrimp and other goodies (I was told that's in the Bible but I'm not sure what page or whose Bible). I supervise the affair from my outpost in my very expensive leather (not faux leather) chair near the outskirts of the room. We acquiesced last year to utilizing a new type of phony tree whose phony branches fold up like an umbrella for storage. What'll they think of next?

Very soon we will be celebrating another year completed with the best bunch of family people I know. There is no way things could have turned out any better for the Schlenoffs. A healthy and happy New Year to all our extended family and here's hoping that Congress wakes up and realizes that the next election is not the most important thing in their lives!!