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More articles, mostly on Christmas
Jewish in a Winter Wonderland
Jewish in a Winter Wonderland
By CINDY CHUPACK
I BLAME the Pottery Barn holiday catalog for the fact that my husband and I, both Jews, spent last weekend at Home Depot picking out a Christmas tree. I cannot blame our kids who begged us mercilessly for a tree, because we do not yet have kids. I cannot blame my parents, because although my dad initially supported George Bush, he never supported the Hanukkah bush.
In fact, I recall that he was extremely judgmental of one Jewish family in the place I grew up (Tulsa), who did have a Christmas tree every year. Even though it was decorated exclusively with blue ornaments and silver bows, my dad made it clear to my sister and me that he thought the whole Jews-with-trees movement was in very poor taste.
Then again, my dad was a man who, in his wood-paneled wet bar, had highball glasses featuring busty women whose clothes disappeared when the glass was full. So I learned early on that taste was subjective.
Fast forward to last month. My husband and I have been married a year and a half, and I am flipping through the Pottery Barn holiday catalog while he sorts the mail, and page after page is something beautiful and not for us, because we are Jews. In my humble opinion, Jews have yet to make Hanukkah decorations beautiful, unless you consider a blue-and-white paper dreidel beautiful, but what can you expect from a holiday whose spelling is constantly up for debate.
So as I browsed past velvet monogrammed stockings and quilted tree skirts and pine wreaths and silver-plated picture frames that doubled as stocking holders (genius!), I said to myself, as much as to my husband: “This is why I sometimes wish I celebrated Christmas. Everything looks so cozy and inviting.” And much to my surprise, he said, “We can celebrate Christmas if you want.” And like a 12-year-old, I said, “We can?” And he said, “Sure.”
It seemed so subversive. Christmas? Really? I thought about it for a moment. Or rather, I thought about what my parents would think. But my parents live 1,200 miles away. They weren’t visiting this season. They wouldn’t even need to know. (Unless, of course, they read about it in The Times. Merry Christmas, Mom and Dad!)
Still, even just considering the idea felt wrong and dirty and, well, totally exhilarating, like your first night away at college, when you realize you can stay out until dawn because nobody is waiting up for you. My husband and I were consenting adults. This was our house. Why couldn’t we celebrate whatever we wanted?
We decided we could, and proceeded to embrace the holiday in all of its materialistic glory. For example, I know it can be annoying to you Christmas veterans, but right now I love nothing more than hearing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” while I’m shopping for stocking stuffers. I love stocking stuffers. I love having stockings to stuff. I love the fact that whole sections of many stores, from CVS to Neiman Marcus, have opened up to me. I love tinsel. It’s so simple, yet so elegant!
I love that as soon as I told a Catholic friend what I was up to, she invited me to a gingerbread-house decorating party. How fun is that? And why wasn’t I invited before? What does a gingerbread house have to do with Jesus?
So here we are: two newlywed Jews celebrating our No No Noel (or Ho Ho Hanukkah) not because we secretly want to convert to Christianity, but because the rampant commercialization of Christmas works! Like your kids who desperately want the toys they see advertised on TV, I wanted monogrammed velvet stockings and my husband wanted the model train that goes around the tree and puffs actual smoke.
That train (which took two hours to assemble) was the first sign that our Christmas may not be all peace on earth, good will toward men. The vision dancing in my head was clearly Pottery Barn, whereas his, I fear, was SkyMall.
He bought blinking colored lights when I was definitely thinking white, and he ordered old-timey glass ornaments — a slice of pizza, a mermaid, a hippo — instead of the jewel-colored balls I had in mind.
And he keeps talking about the fake snow ("Should we get the blanket or just use cotton balls?") when I wasn’t thinking fake snow at all. I definitely haven’t seen any fake snow in the Pottery Barn catalog. And then at Home Depot, I practically had to pry the mechanical lawn snowman out of his hands. He’s like a Christmas crackhead — had a taste and now he can’t stop.
But despite our differences, we both love our little winter wonderland. Some nights, I put on our Starbucks Christmas CD, light a fire, turn on the tree and play with the different settings, put liquid smoke in the train’s smokestack and turn on the choo-choo sound effects and then I sit back and enjoy my first Christmas, in all its kitschy splendor. I feel a little guilty when I look at our lone menorah on the mantel (the only evidence of my faith other than my guilt), but I ask you: how can this much pleasure be wrong?
Before you answer that in a snappy letter to the editor, fellow Jews (including you, Dad), let me just say that I’m pretty sure that if we’re fortunate enough to have children, we will raise them with the same arbitrary rules we were raised with, trying our best to sell that old chestnut (roasting on an open fire) that “eight nights is better than one,” and putting this tradition behind us until the kids go off to college, if not forever.
On the other hand, maybe it’s nice to teach children that holidays can be done à la carte. Every religion, every culture has so many beautiful rituals and traditions to choose from. Maybe celebrating is a step toward tolerating. I can hardly wait for Hanukkwanzaa.
Alas for Tiny Tim, He Became a Christmas Cliché
Alas for Tiny Tim, He Became a Christmas Cliché
By HARRIET McBRYDE JOHNSON
Charleston, S.C.
DECEMBER at the Crippled Children’s School got tedious. Our schedule was packed with holiday parties, some of which made the newspaper. Whether the holiday benefactors were medical students, faculty wives, organized Baptists or Navy men, the drill was the same. We drank their punch, ate their food, acted nice and said thank you, never forgetting that some of these people might be back with serious money. There were some real needs.
Capping off the month was the unvarying Nativity play. We once considered doing the story of Scrooge. But who would be Tiny Tim? In that department, we had an embarrassment of riches: any of us could do his shtick and better. “Alas for Tiny Tim,” Dickens wrote, “he bore a little crutch, and had his limbs supported by an iron frame!”
Alas! A little crutch! An iron frame! In our world, the crutch-and-brace kids were the athletic elite. They picked up the stuff we hard-core crips dropped.
If Tiny Tim got more fuss than he deserved, we didn’t blame Dickens. We figured Tiny Tim had Dickens snowed. He even had his parents snowed. Look at what his father says when his mother asks how Tiny Tim behaved in church:
“As good as gold, and better,” says Bob. “He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.”
Tiny Tim knew how to give an audience what it wanted. He was ancestor to all telethon poster children and the perfect model for our holiday-party behavior. He joins in festive singing — plaintively. He cries hurrah — feebly. He says, “God bless us every one!”
Tiny Tim, like some of us, was ostensibly doomed. “A Christmas Carol” teaches that no one, not even a real scrooge like Scrooge, can resist the appeal of an ostensibly doomed child.
People ate it up and still do. As heart-melting poster children come and go, Tiny Tim lives on. When a theater company in my neighborhood recently announced yet another production of “A Christmas Carol,” I decided it was time to reread the story.
I approached the book in the spirit of know-thine-enemy. In fact, I found an awful lot to like. “A Christmas Carol” swings between warm and cold, soft and harsh, sensual and spooky. It panders to our prurient fascination with food. It also gives us dancing, singing, and the giddy exhilaration of sudden redemption.
Those crowd-pleasing trappings I remembered. What surprised me went a bit deeper: the story bristles with condemnation of wealth’s arrogance in the face of poverty. As the tale begins, Scrooge is not merely stingy and mean. He is a Social Darwinist. He believes in workhouses and prisons to meet the needs of the poor and in starvation to reduce the surplus population. While disability may make Tiny Tim’s life precarious, the story hints that privation is what would seal his doom.
As the ghosts show Scrooge the consequences of his actions, they also impeach him with his own philosophy. When Scrooge asks if Tiny Tim will live, the first part of the spirit’s response has become part of popular culture: “I see a ... crutch without an owner, carefully preserved ... if these shadows remain unaltered ....”
But the ghost goes on: “What then? If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. ... Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man’s child. Oh God! to hear the insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!”
The ghost’s point is still worth making in our time, when some of the people who consume most of the world’s resources hold disabled lives cheap and begrudge the “too much” of the poor. Through the ghost, Dickens cries for justice for millions.
But he lets that cry be overshadowed by the sweet melodrama of one ostensibly doomed child. In the end, the story’s overriding directive, cherished in today’s holiday hullabaloo, is to take time off work and celebrate with family, and from our abundance to toss some holiday merriment at the less fortunate.
The genius of most successful propaganda is to know what the audience wants and how far it will go. Perhaps, marked by his own family’s experience of the poorhouse, Dickens hoped Tiny Tim would inveigle holiday benefactors into making feel-good gestures and then returning to address the real needs. Perhaps Dickens hoped charity might prove a catalyst for something beyond charity.
But then and now, the season of giving is about the feel-good gesture. Holding a party at the Crippled Children’s School is so easy, so immediately satisfying. It is much harder, the prospect of reward often so remote, to seek justice for our sisters and brothers in the dust.
An Atheist Can Believe in Christmas
An Atheist Can Believe in Christmas
By RANDY KENNEDY
IF last holiday season charitably could have been described as the war-on-Christmas Christmas — with Bill O’Reilly of Fox News declaring war on the warriors and others declaring war on him — maybe it’s not such a stretch to think of this year’s prevalent yuletide theme as the war-on-Christ Christmas.
And not just Christ by himself, of course. Also God and Allah and every other version of an omnipotent, unseen deity who inspires annual celebrations, love, obedience and occasional fanaticism among untold millions.
At least such a theme is the message that book buyers seem to be sending. “The God Delusion,” a jeremiad against religious belief by Richard Dawkins, a British evolutionary biologist at Oxford, reached No. 4 on the New York Times best-seller list recently and sits at No. 6 today, a week before Christmas. “Letter to a Christian Nation,” another spirited defense of atheism, by its American standard-bearer, Sam Harris, reached No. 6 in October. He wrote a previous best seller, “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason.”
In the current issue of the New Republic, the critic James Wood delves into both books and lays out his personal development as a nonbeliever, beginning at 15 and including the requisite reading of Bertrand Russell’s “Why I Am Not a Christian” — a revelation, he writes, “like seeing someone in the nude, for the first time.”
With all this high-profile atheism in mind, it might come as something of a surprise to learn what sort of tree Mr. Harris has sitting in his living room right now. Let’s just say that it is not a ficus, that it tapers to a little peak practically begging for a star and that it is currently sporting some lovely ornaments on its branches.
In a recent phone interview, Mr. Harris explained that as a “full-time infidel” these days, with book-tour and speaking duties, he didn’t have time to pick out his Christmas tree personally. And it was really not his idea but a result “of a lost tug of war with my wife,” who likes Christmas trappings and insisted on buying it. But he added that his reluctance “was good-natured all the while.”
In other words, he is a having a (relatively) holly, jolly atheistic Christmas, one that will include presents and a big family party. And Mr. Harris, who was raised by a Jewish mother and a Quaker father, sees no glaring contradiction in doing so, at least not one he feels the need to spend much time thinking about.
“It seems to me to be obvious that everything we value in Christmas — giving gifts, celebrating the holiday with our families, enjoying all of the kitsch that comes along with it — all of that has been entirely appropriated by the secular world,” he said, “in the same way that Thanksgiving and Halloween have been.”
Mr. Dawkins, reached by e-mail somewhere on a book tour, was asked about his own Christmas philosophy. The response sounded almost as if he and Mr. Harris — and maybe other members of a soon-to-be-chartered Atheists Who Kind of Don’t Object to Christmas Club — had hashed out a statement of principles. Strangely, these principles find much common ground with Christians who complain about the holiday’s over-commercialization and secularization, though the atheists bemoan the former and appreciate the latter.
“Presumably your reason for asking me is that ‘The God Delusion’ is an atheistic book, and you still think of Christmas as a religious festival,” Mr. Dawkins wrote, in a reply printed here in its entirety. “But of course it has long since ceased to be a religious festival. I participate for family reasons, with a reluctance that owes more to aesthetics than atheistics. I detest Jingle Bells, White Christmas, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, and the obscene spending bonanza that nowadays seems to occupy not just December, but November and much of October, too.”
He added: “So divorced has Christmas become from religion that I find no necessity to bother with euphemisms such as happy holiday season. In the same way as many of my friends call themselves Jewish atheists, I acknowledge that I come from Christian cultural roots. I am a post-Christian atheist. So, understanding full well that the phrase retains zero religious significance, I unhesitatingly wish everyone a Merry Christmas.”
Such obliging feelings toward Christmas will undoubtedly serve as another piece of evidence for those like Mr. O’Reilly and conservative Christians who feel that the holiday has been hijacked — so much so that even atheists are now comfortable getting into the spirit. But to listen to Mr. Harris and other nonbelieving Christmas celebrators, you sometimes get the feeling that their accommodation stems from the fact that Christmas — no matter how religious it still is or is not — has become such a juggernaut that it is simply impossible to ignore entirely. So why not grin, bear it and have yourself a double eggnog?
Even hardliners like David Silverman, the national spokesman for American Atheists, the group founded by Madalyn Murray O’Hair, find it difficult. Many of Mr. Silverman’s fellow atheists celebrate the Winter Solstice, which occurs Thursday at 7:22 p.m. Eastern Time, or HumanLight, a humanist event created in 2001 by a group of New Jersey residents and observed this coming Saturday. But not Mr. Silverman, who feels that any such doings around Christmastime are suspect. “There’s such a Christian flavor to it,” he said of the season, “that it’s just not to my taste.”
But he added that, as with his mother’s Passover, some seasonal participation is just too hard to avoid.
Besides, he admitted, “I do like to go to the parties.”
Mr. Harris does, too. As for the tree, he wanted to assure his nonbelieving friends that it was a miniature: “This is a tree that even an atheist would be comfortable with.”
And one on ASL and all in Rochester.
Where Sign Language Is Far From Foreign
By MICHELLE YORK
ROCHESTER, N.Y., Dec. 22 — Waiters take orders using American Sign Language. Doctors’ offices are equipped with videophones that flash rather than ring. The latest movies are shown with captions.
Tucked in the western part of New York, Rochester is home to the nation’s largest deaf population per capita, with about 90,000 people who are deaf or hard of hearing living among the metropolitan area’s 700,000 residents. The city’s transformation began in 1968 with the opening of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf.
The community’s embracing of all things deaf has provided comfort to a city where many industries and young people have fled for more prosperous parts in recent years.
“What’s happening in Rochester today will influence the rest of the country years from now,” said Thomas Holcomb, a professor of deaf studies from Ohlone College in Fremont, Calif. “It’s on the frontier.”
It is here that the world of the deaf intersects the world of the hearing as in no other city.
“People outside Rochester know us for that,” said Maggie Brooks, the executive of Monroe County. “We’re proving ourselves as a leader.”
This was not always the case. When the institute was established here with the notion of offering the most mainstream environment possible, open not only to signers but to nonsigners alike, controversy swirled like snow in February off Lake Ontario.
“People were honestly scared,” Professor Holcomb, who is deaf, said through an interpreter. With signing at the root of the deaf culture, “they thought it would destroy everything we cherished, and the future of American Sign Language was in doubt,” he said.
Despite that initial concern, the student population here has grown from a few dozen in its first year to hundreds. What’s more, many have settled in the community. And that has attracted other deaf people with no connection to the college.
Francis Kimmes, who moved here in 1972, was born deaf to parents who were not, and for years struggled with a sense of isolation.
Mr. Kimmes, 60, knew only three other deaf people in his hometown, Niagara Falls, so he communicated with the world through a frustrating mix of lip reading and gesturing. But in Rochester he found he could make friends and lead an active life using his first real language, American Sign. He joined a Catholic church for the deaf, found work on the assembly line at Eastman Kodak, married, and raised two sons.
“I felt more free,” Mr. Kimmes said through an interpreter. “It hit me. It was powerful. I realized, there was no real life back there, where I was.”
As the deaf population has grown, the city has changed. T. Alan Hurwitz, dean of the institute, said he has noticed that in the last few years, the city has created more opportunities for deaf people to be part of the community.
“It’s everywhere you go,” Dr. Hurwitz said through an interpreter.
Three movie theaters show newly released films with captions. Nearly all of the high schools offer sign-language classes. The Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester employs a deaf docent.
That can have a deep effect on newcomers.
“When I came to Rochester, people would attempt to sign; it was so neat,” said Lizzie Sorkin, 25, a senior at the college, and the first deaf student president of the entire Rochester Institute of Technology campus, which includes 15,000 hearing students and 1,200 deaf students at the institute. “I feel like I’m not deaf. I’m a person.”
In the last few years, there has also been an influx of deaf doctors, a rare comfort to patients who do not want to discuss their health in front of an interpreter. Dozens of other professionals, including real estate and insurance agents and bank officers — all of them either deaf or fluent in sign language — are part of the community.
“When I first moved here, I was shocked to see so many deaf people,” Alexandra Ling, 23, who came from the Boston area to attend the institute here, wrote in an e-mail message. “I decided to stay here because I felt really comfortable. People at stores and restaurants understand deafness, so there’s a lot less communication barriers even though they are hearing.”
When Spencer Phillips moved to this city three years ago, it was the end of a long and often difficult journey that had begun in a slippery backyard waterslide. Mr. Phillips was 7 when he fell and struck his head, and that night he lost most of his ability to hear.
As he grew up in Los Angeles, he knew he was different, though he did not consider himself deaf. That changed when at age 19, Mr. Phillips, a Mormon, chose to live among deaf adults and learn sign language for a two-year-ministry project.
“I realized it was part of who I was, too,” he said recently.
He was 27 and finishing law school in Utah when he read a magazine article about a deaf doctor who had opened a practice in Rochester. “I thought, that is so cool,” he said. “Why not go to where she is?”
Mr. Phillips won a two-year legal fellowship to help the underserved deaf community, and never left.
As for the deaf community’s fears that a mainstream college would spell the death of American Sign Language, Dr. Holcomb said those concerns have melted away. Indeed, the number of interpreters, professionals and services has sharply risen. “I can see that spreading across the country,” he said. “It’s a great model.”
Parker Zack, a real estate agent, has observed more people in Rochester trying to sign, even finger spell, than in other cities where he has lived. Mr. Zack, 50, who can hear, became obsessed with sign language after watching his deaf aunt and uncle converse growing up.
“The way they would communicate with each other was so beautiful,” he said. “It was like artwork.”
As a student at the University of Rochester, Mr. Zack became friendly with several deaf people, who suggested that he pursue his master’s degree at Gallaudet University for the deaf in Washington. He did, and after receiving his master’s in psychology, he joined the faculty there, becoming a director of student life.
But a request by a friend who was a real estate agent to interpret for her deaf clients changed his career. The agent made missteps, he said. “Deaf people don’t care how quiet the house is,” he said. When the couple was ready to buy, they showed up on his doorstep. “They didn’t go to their agent,” he said. “They came to me.”
With that, Mr. Zack became a real estate agent who specialized in serving the deaf. After working in Virginia, he returned to Rochester, where about 70 percent of his clients are deaf, he said. “I find it a lot better use of my counseling degree than sitting in a cubicle somewhere typing memos,” he said.
And he has never lacked for clients.
“There are always deaf people moving here,” he said.
Jewish in a Winter Wonderland
By CINDY CHUPACK
I BLAME the Pottery Barn holiday catalog for the fact that my husband and I, both Jews, spent last weekend at Home Depot picking out a Christmas tree. I cannot blame our kids who begged us mercilessly for a tree, because we do not yet have kids. I cannot blame my parents, because although my dad initially supported George Bush, he never supported the Hanukkah bush.
In fact, I recall that he was extremely judgmental of one Jewish family in the place I grew up (Tulsa), who did have a Christmas tree every year. Even though it was decorated exclusively with blue ornaments and silver bows, my dad made it clear to my sister and me that he thought the whole Jews-with-trees movement was in very poor taste.
Then again, my dad was a man who, in his wood-paneled wet bar, had highball glasses featuring busty women whose clothes disappeared when the glass was full. So I learned early on that taste was subjective.
Fast forward to last month. My husband and I have been married a year and a half, and I am flipping through the Pottery Barn holiday catalog while he sorts the mail, and page after page is something beautiful and not for us, because we are Jews. In my humble opinion, Jews have yet to make Hanukkah decorations beautiful, unless you consider a blue-and-white paper dreidel beautiful, but what can you expect from a holiday whose spelling is constantly up for debate.
So as I browsed past velvet monogrammed stockings and quilted tree skirts and pine wreaths and silver-plated picture frames that doubled as stocking holders (genius!), I said to myself, as much as to my husband: “This is why I sometimes wish I celebrated Christmas. Everything looks so cozy and inviting.” And much to my surprise, he said, “We can celebrate Christmas if you want.” And like a 12-year-old, I said, “We can?” And he said, “Sure.”
It seemed so subversive. Christmas? Really? I thought about it for a moment. Or rather, I thought about what my parents would think. But my parents live 1,200 miles away. They weren’t visiting this season. They wouldn’t even need to know. (Unless, of course, they read about it in The Times. Merry Christmas, Mom and Dad!)
Still, even just considering the idea felt wrong and dirty and, well, totally exhilarating, like your first night away at college, when you realize you can stay out until dawn because nobody is waiting up for you. My husband and I were consenting adults. This was our house. Why couldn’t we celebrate whatever we wanted?
We decided we could, and proceeded to embrace the holiday in all of its materialistic glory. For example, I know it can be annoying to you Christmas veterans, but right now I love nothing more than hearing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” while I’m shopping for stocking stuffers. I love stocking stuffers. I love having stockings to stuff. I love the fact that whole sections of many stores, from CVS to Neiman Marcus, have opened up to me. I love tinsel. It’s so simple, yet so elegant!
I love that as soon as I told a Catholic friend what I was up to, she invited me to a gingerbread-house decorating party. How fun is that? And why wasn’t I invited before? What does a gingerbread house have to do with Jesus?
So here we are: two newlywed Jews celebrating our No No Noel (or Ho Ho Hanukkah) not because we secretly want to convert to Christianity, but because the rampant commercialization of Christmas works! Like your kids who desperately want the toys they see advertised on TV, I wanted monogrammed velvet stockings and my husband wanted the model train that goes around the tree and puffs actual smoke.
That train (which took two hours to assemble) was the first sign that our Christmas may not be all peace on earth, good will toward men. The vision dancing in my head was clearly Pottery Barn, whereas his, I fear, was SkyMall.
He bought blinking colored lights when I was definitely thinking white, and he ordered old-timey glass ornaments — a slice of pizza, a mermaid, a hippo — instead of the jewel-colored balls I had in mind.
And he keeps talking about the fake snow ("Should we get the blanket or just use cotton balls?") when I wasn’t thinking fake snow at all. I definitely haven’t seen any fake snow in the Pottery Barn catalog. And then at Home Depot, I practically had to pry the mechanical lawn snowman out of his hands. He’s like a Christmas crackhead — had a taste and now he can’t stop.
But despite our differences, we both love our little winter wonderland. Some nights, I put on our Starbucks Christmas CD, light a fire, turn on the tree and play with the different settings, put liquid smoke in the train’s smokestack and turn on the choo-choo sound effects and then I sit back and enjoy my first Christmas, in all its kitschy splendor. I feel a little guilty when I look at our lone menorah on the mantel (the only evidence of my faith other than my guilt), but I ask you: how can this much pleasure be wrong?
Before you answer that in a snappy letter to the editor, fellow Jews (including you, Dad), let me just say that I’m pretty sure that if we’re fortunate enough to have children, we will raise them with the same arbitrary rules we were raised with, trying our best to sell that old chestnut (roasting on an open fire) that “eight nights is better than one,” and putting this tradition behind us until the kids go off to college, if not forever.
On the other hand, maybe it’s nice to teach children that holidays can be done à la carte. Every religion, every culture has so many beautiful rituals and traditions to choose from. Maybe celebrating is a step toward tolerating. I can hardly wait for Hanukkwanzaa.
Alas for Tiny Tim, He Became a Christmas Cliché
Alas for Tiny Tim, He Became a Christmas Cliché
By HARRIET McBRYDE JOHNSON
Charleston, S.C.
DECEMBER at the Crippled Children’s School got tedious. Our schedule was packed with holiday parties, some of which made the newspaper. Whether the holiday benefactors were medical students, faculty wives, organized Baptists or Navy men, the drill was the same. We drank their punch, ate their food, acted nice and said thank you, never forgetting that some of these people might be back with serious money. There were some real needs.
Capping off the month was the unvarying Nativity play. We once considered doing the story of Scrooge. But who would be Tiny Tim? In that department, we had an embarrassment of riches: any of us could do his shtick and better. “Alas for Tiny Tim,” Dickens wrote, “he bore a little crutch, and had his limbs supported by an iron frame!”
Alas! A little crutch! An iron frame! In our world, the crutch-and-brace kids were the athletic elite. They picked up the stuff we hard-core crips dropped.
If Tiny Tim got more fuss than he deserved, we didn’t blame Dickens. We figured Tiny Tim had Dickens snowed. He even had his parents snowed. Look at what his father says when his mother asks how Tiny Tim behaved in church:
“As good as gold, and better,” says Bob. “He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.”
Tiny Tim knew how to give an audience what it wanted. He was ancestor to all telethon poster children and the perfect model for our holiday-party behavior. He joins in festive singing — plaintively. He cries hurrah — feebly. He says, “God bless us every one!”
Tiny Tim, like some of us, was ostensibly doomed. “A Christmas Carol” teaches that no one, not even a real scrooge like Scrooge, can resist the appeal of an ostensibly doomed child.
People ate it up and still do. As heart-melting poster children come and go, Tiny Tim lives on. When a theater company in my neighborhood recently announced yet another production of “A Christmas Carol,” I decided it was time to reread the story.
I approached the book in the spirit of know-thine-enemy. In fact, I found an awful lot to like. “A Christmas Carol” swings between warm and cold, soft and harsh, sensual and spooky. It panders to our prurient fascination with food. It also gives us dancing, singing, and the giddy exhilaration of sudden redemption.
Those crowd-pleasing trappings I remembered. What surprised me went a bit deeper: the story bristles with condemnation of wealth’s arrogance in the face of poverty. As the tale begins, Scrooge is not merely stingy and mean. He is a Social Darwinist. He believes in workhouses and prisons to meet the needs of the poor and in starvation to reduce the surplus population. While disability may make Tiny Tim’s life precarious, the story hints that privation is what would seal his doom.
As the ghosts show Scrooge the consequences of his actions, they also impeach him with his own philosophy. When Scrooge asks if Tiny Tim will live, the first part of the spirit’s response has become part of popular culture: “I see a ... crutch without an owner, carefully preserved ... if these shadows remain unaltered ....”
But the ghost goes on: “What then? If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. ... Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man’s child. Oh God! to hear the insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!”
The ghost’s point is still worth making in our time, when some of the people who consume most of the world’s resources hold disabled lives cheap and begrudge the “too much” of the poor. Through the ghost, Dickens cries for justice for millions.
But he lets that cry be overshadowed by the sweet melodrama of one ostensibly doomed child. In the end, the story’s overriding directive, cherished in today’s holiday hullabaloo, is to take time off work and celebrate with family, and from our abundance to toss some holiday merriment at the less fortunate.
The genius of most successful propaganda is to know what the audience wants and how far it will go. Perhaps, marked by his own family’s experience of the poorhouse, Dickens hoped Tiny Tim would inveigle holiday benefactors into making feel-good gestures and then returning to address the real needs. Perhaps Dickens hoped charity might prove a catalyst for something beyond charity.
But then and now, the season of giving is about the feel-good gesture. Holding a party at the Crippled Children’s School is so easy, so immediately satisfying. It is much harder, the prospect of reward often so remote, to seek justice for our sisters and brothers in the dust.
An Atheist Can Believe in Christmas
An Atheist Can Believe in Christmas
By RANDY KENNEDY
IF last holiday season charitably could have been described as the war-on-Christmas Christmas — with Bill O’Reilly of Fox News declaring war on the warriors and others declaring war on him — maybe it’s not such a stretch to think of this year’s prevalent yuletide theme as the war-on-Christ Christmas.
And not just Christ by himself, of course. Also God and Allah and every other version of an omnipotent, unseen deity who inspires annual celebrations, love, obedience and occasional fanaticism among untold millions.
At least such a theme is the message that book buyers seem to be sending. “The God Delusion,” a jeremiad against religious belief by Richard Dawkins, a British evolutionary biologist at Oxford, reached No. 4 on the New York Times best-seller list recently and sits at No. 6 today, a week before Christmas. “Letter to a Christian Nation,” another spirited defense of atheism, by its American standard-bearer, Sam Harris, reached No. 6 in October. He wrote a previous best seller, “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason.”
In the current issue of the New Republic, the critic James Wood delves into both books and lays out his personal development as a nonbeliever, beginning at 15 and including the requisite reading of Bertrand Russell’s “Why I Am Not a Christian” — a revelation, he writes, “like seeing someone in the nude, for the first time.”
With all this high-profile atheism in mind, it might come as something of a surprise to learn what sort of tree Mr. Harris has sitting in his living room right now. Let’s just say that it is not a ficus, that it tapers to a little peak practically begging for a star and that it is currently sporting some lovely ornaments on its branches.
In a recent phone interview, Mr. Harris explained that as a “full-time infidel” these days, with book-tour and speaking duties, he didn’t have time to pick out his Christmas tree personally. And it was really not his idea but a result “of a lost tug of war with my wife,” who likes Christmas trappings and insisted on buying it. But he added that his reluctance “was good-natured all the while.”
In other words, he is a having a (relatively) holly, jolly atheistic Christmas, one that will include presents and a big family party. And Mr. Harris, who was raised by a Jewish mother and a Quaker father, sees no glaring contradiction in doing so, at least not one he feels the need to spend much time thinking about.
“It seems to me to be obvious that everything we value in Christmas — giving gifts, celebrating the holiday with our families, enjoying all of the kitsch that comes along with it — all of that has been entirely appropriated by the secular world,” he said, “in the same way that Thanksgiving and Halloween have been.”
Mr. Dawkins, reached by e-mail somewhere on a book tour, was asked about his own Christmas philosophy. The response sounded almost as if he and Mr. Harris — and maybe other members of a soon-to-be-chartered Atheists Who Kind of Don’t Object to Christmas Club — had hashed out a statement of principles. Strangely, these principles find much common ground with Christians who complain about the holiday’s over-commercialization and secularization, though the atheists bemoan the former and appreciate the latter.
“Presumably your reason for asking me is that ‘The God Delusion’ is an atheistic book, and you still think of Christmas as a religious festival,” Mr. Dawkins wrote, in a reply printed here in its entirety. “But of course it has long since ceased to be a religious festival. I participate for family reasons, with a reluctance that owes more to aesthetics than atheistics. I detest Jingle Bells, White Christmas, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, and the obscene spending bonanza that nowadays seems to occupy not just December, but November and much of October, too.”
He added: “So divorced has Christmas become from religion that I find no necessity to bother with euphemisms such as happy holiday season. In the same way as many of my friends call themselves Jewish atheists, I acknowledge that I come from Christian cultural roots. I am a post-Christian atheist. So, understanding full well that the phrase retains zero religious significance, I unhesitatingly wish everyone a Merry Christmas.”
Such obliging feelings toward Christmas will undoubtedly serve as another piece of evidence for those like Mr. O’Reilly and conservative Christians who feel that the holiday has been hijacked — so much so that even atheists are now comfortable getting into the spirit. But to listen to Mr. Harris and other nonbelieving Christmas celebrators, you sometimes get the feeling that their accommodation stems from the fact that Christmas — no matter how religious it still is or is not — has become such a juggernaut that it is simply impossible to ignore entirely. So why not grin, bear it and have yourself a double eggnog?
Even hardliners like David Silverman, the national spokesman for American Atheists, the group founded by Madalyn Murray O’Hair, find it difficult. Many of Mr. Silverman’s fellow atheists celebrate the Winter Solstice, which occurs Thursday at 7:22 p.m. Eastern Time, or HumanLight, a humanist event created in 2001 by a group of New Jersey residents and observed this coming Saturday. But not Mr. Silverman, who feels that any such doings around Christmastime are suspect. “There’s such a Christian flavor to it,” he said of the season, “that it’s just not to my taste.”
But he added that, as with his mother’s Passover, some seasonal participation is just too hard to avoid.
Besides, he admitted, “I do like to go to the parties.”
Mr. Harris does, too. As for the tree, he wanted to assure his nonbelieving friends that it was a miniature: “This is a tree that even an atheist would be comfortable with.”
And one on ASL and all in Rochester.
Where Sign Language Is Far From Foreign
By MICHELLE YORK
ROCHESTER, N.Y., Dec. 22 — Waiters take orders using American Sign Language. Doctors’ offices are equipped with videophones that flash rather than ring. The latest movies are shown with captions.
Tucked in the western part of New York, Rochester is home to the nation’s largest deaf population per capita, with about 90,000 people who are deaf or hard of hearing living among the metropolitan area’s 700,000 residents. The city’s transformation began in 1968 with the opening of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf.
The community’s embracing of all things deaf has provided comfort to a city where many industries and young people have fled for more prosperous parts in recent years.
“What’s happening in Rochester today will influence the rest of the country years from now,” said Thomas Holcomb, a professor of deaf studies from Ohlone College in Fremont, Calif. “It’s on the frontier.”
It is here that the world of the deaf intersects the world of the hearing as in no other city.
“People outside Rochester know us for that,” said Maggie Brooks, the executive of Monroe County. “We’re proving ourselves as a leader.”
This was not always the case. When the institute was established here with the notion of offering the most mainstream environment possible, open not only to signers but to nonsigners alike, controversy swirled like snow in February off Lake Ontario.
“People were honestly scared,” Professor Holcomb, who is deaf, said through an interpreter. With signing at the root of the deaf culture, “they thought it would destroy everything we cherished, and the future of American Sign Language was in doubt,” he said.
Despite that initial concern, the student population here has grown from a few dozen in its first year to hundreds. What’s more, many have settled in the community. And that has attracted other deaf people with no connection to the college.
Francis Kimmes, who moved here in 1972, was born deaf to parents who were not, and for years struggled with a sense of isolation.
Mr. Kimmes, 60, knew only three other deaf people in his hometown, Niagara Falls, so he communicated with the world through a frustrating mix of lip reading and gesturing. But in Rochester he found he could make friends and lead an active life using his first real language, American Sign. He joined a Catholic church for the deaf, found work on the assembly line at Eastman Kodak, married, and raised two sons.
“I felt more free,” Mr. Kimmes said through an interpreter. “It hit me. It was powerful. I realized, there was no real life back there, where I was.”
As the deaf population has grown, the city has changed. T. Alan Hurwitz, dean of the institute, said he has noticed that in the last few years, the city has created more opportunities for deaf people to be part of the community.
“It’s everywhere you go,” Dr. Hurwitz said through an interpreter.
Three movie theaters show newly released films with captions. Nearly all of the high schools offer sign-language classes. The Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester employs a deaf docent.
That can have a deep effect on newcomers.
“When I came to Rochester, people would attempt to sign; it was so neat,” said Lizzie Sorkin, 25, a senior at the college, and the first deaf student president of the entire Rochester Institute of Technology campus, which includes 15,000 hearing students and 1,200 deaf students at the institute. “I feel like I’m not deaf. I’m a person.”
In the last few years, there has also been an influx of deaf doctors, a rare comfort to patients who do not want to discuss their health in front of an interpreter. Dozens of other professionals, including real estate and insurance agents and bank officers — all of them either deaf or fluent in sign language — are part of the community.
“When I first moved here, I was shocked to see so many deaf people,” Alexandra Ling, 23, who came from the Boston area to attend the institute here, wrote in an e-mail message. “I decided to stay here because I felt really comfortable. People at stores and restaurants understand deafness, so there’s a lot less communication barriers even though they are hearing.”
When Spencer Phillips moved to this city three years ago, it was the end of a long and often difficult journey that had begun in a slippery backyard waterslide. Mr. Phillips was 7 when he fell and struck his head, and that night he lost most of his ability to hear.
As he grew up in Los Angeles, he knew he was different, though he did not consider himself deaf. That changed when at age 19, Mr. Phillips, a Mormon, chose to live among deaf adults and learn sign language for a two-year-ministry project.
“I realized it was part of who I was, too,” he said recently.
He was 27 and finishing law school in Utah when he read a magazine article about a deaf doctor who had opened a practice in Rochester. “I thought, that is so cool,” he said. “Why not go to where she is?”
Mr. Phillips won a two-year legal fellowship to help the underserved deaf community, and never left.
As for the deaf community’s fears that a mainstream college would spell the death of American Sign Language, Dr. Holcomb said those concerns have melted away. Indeed, the number of interpreters, professionals and services has sharply risen. “I can see that spreading across the country,” he said. “It’s a great model.”
Parker Zack, a real estate agent, has observed more people in Rochester trying to sign, even finger spell, than in other cities where he has lived. Mr. Zack, 50, who can hear, became obsessed with sign language after watching his deaf aunt and uncle converse growing up.
“The way they would communicate with each other was so beautiful,” he said. “It was like artwork.”
As a student at the University of Rochester, Mr. Zack became friendly with several deaf people, who suggested that he pursue his master’s degree at Gallaudet University for the deaf in Washington. He did, and after receiving his master’s in psychology, he joined the faculty there, becoming a director of student life.
But a request by a friend who was a real estate agent to interpret for her deaf clients changed his career. The agent made missteps, he said. “Deaf people don’t care how quiet the house is,” he said. When the couple was ready to buy, they showed up on his doorstep. “They didn’t go to their agent,” he said. “They came to me.”
With that, Mr. Zack became a real estate agent who specialized in serving the deaf. After working in Virginia, he returned to Rochester, where about 70 percent of his clients are deaf, he said. “I find it a lot better use of my counseling degree than sitting in a cubicle somewhere typing memos,” he said.
And he has never lacked for clients.
“There are always deaf people moving here,” he said.
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