The Best Holiday Gift Ever

Most of you, I realize, will be reading this on Christmas Eve, but for me this is the day we put away the Hanukkah menorahs.

We have two. One is the traditional kind, with candle holders. The other is electric. Instead of lighting candles, you tighten bulbs. Pretty kitschy, I know. That’s what I like about it.

In my old house we kept the menorahs in the dining room so we could admire them during dinner, and the Christmas tree in the living room. In my new house, living and dining rooms flow into each other so our ritual objects do as well.

We have both, tree and menorahs, because we are both. That is, I grew up on Hanukkah, my beloved grew up on Christmas and my children grew up on latkes, Hanukkah gelt, Advent calendar chocolates, and plates of cookies and carrots for Santa and his reindeer. It is normal in such a household to listen to Handel’s “Messiah” and then to Itzhak Perlman and the Klezmatics.

I forget in such a household how exotic Jews and Jewish customs can be to non-Jews. Here is what I say to my goyish friends when they ask me what I remember about Hanukkahs past:

When I was a kid, the Festival of Lights had already become the Jewish Christmas, so I was surprised to learn from my Hebrew School teachers that it was a minor holiday. The poor schlemiels who grew up a generation before I did got handfuls of walnuts and raisins. That wouldn’t do for kids raised in the ‘burbs whose peers were getting bikes from Santa. Jewish parents needed to step up.

My only specific childhood Hanukkah memory is from the year my parents stepped up in a big way. It was the year of the giant dreidel. Dreidels are four-sided tops that are usually small enough to twist between two fingers. The giant ones, made of cardboard and painted blue with glittery gold Hebrew letters on each side, were designed to serve as Jewish Christmas trees. That is, they were so big that you could put presents under them.

Or around them, as was the case that one special year. When I came downstairs, the dreidel was encircled by model railroad tracks. In a big gift-wrapped box was the train: locomotive, boxcar, tanker, coal car and a red caboose.

My dad helped me hook up the wires from the transformer to the track. Then, with the grooves of the train wheels fitted to the tracks and the cars coupled to each other, I turned the dial on the transformer, heard an electric hum and slowly, like a bull pawing the ground in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, the locomotive huffed to life.

The thing I immediately liked best about having a train set was the locomotive’s headlamp. I insisted that we turn the room lights off to get the full effect. I can still picture that thin bright beam moving across a wall as the train made its circuit of the track.

As the Lionel people well knew, it does not take long for a child to tire of watching a train go around in a circle. One must have more: a length of crossover track so that one can construct a figure 8, manual switches for more complex layouts, trestles, tunnels, railroad crossing signs, a depot, little Lionel people and pets and best of all, lamp posts that attach to the track and light up.

Before too long my dad and I went to the lumberyard for a piece of plywood on which to permanently attach the tracks and the village that was growing up around the tracks. We also bought a can of spray paint that spit out green textured flecks that were supposed to look like grass and did, kind of.

If you’re picturing some vast assemblage like what you’d see in a hobby store, know that mine was a rather modest affair. What kept it from getting too elaborate was my getting older. No matter how fancy the track layout or how many switches were built into it, the train is still just going round and round. The only way to keep it interesting, if you’re a pre-teen, is to sabotage it.

What would happen, my partners in crime and I wondered, if we didn’t switch tracks when we were supposed to? And so we began orchestrating ever more spectacular derailments and collisions and off-the-board plunges.

Those Lionels could take a licking, though. What led to the demise of the whole miniature world was not the damage we did to the moving stock but the burning out of the transformer. Once the train couldn’t chuff along under its own power, the plywood board, which took up a lot of basement space, was stashed on its side somewhere. Eventually it must have quietly gone out to the curb.

I haven’t opened this year’s holiday gifts yet. I’ll be enormously grateful for whatever I get, but I gotta say, my nearest and dearest are going to be hard pressed to top that train set.

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