The Family that Prays Together

Rosh Hashanah, Ash Wednesday, Thanksgiving, Yom Kippur, Passover, Fourth of July, Christmas, Hanukkah, Easter, Purim. Lots and lots of holidays. Days off from school, train rides, bus rides, car rides, plane rides, bags, dress shoes, shirts, and ties. Aunts and uncles, cousins, grandparents, brothers, sisters, mom, and dad. Synagogue, temple, church.

Aspirin?

I believe that the holidays are underway, and like a wide receiver with a torn ACL, I think I might be out for the season. It is just too much to take, what with the fussing and the running through Penn Station and forgetting your second cousins' names. We, the people of Columbia University, exist as a group of stranded citizens, constantly arriving and departing for the religious, family, and state-issued holidays that bring us that joy that is so hard to define, so delicate and pure.

That joy that can best be seen on the face of a six-year-old child as he gleefully tears the shiny, metallic Christmas-tree gift-wrap from a shrink-wrapped copy of a Jeopardy! CD-ROM? What is wrong with these people? Did you ask Santa for this? Impossible: Santa would have thought that you had gotten into the varnish again if you asked for a wankerish thing like that.

But there it is, staring back at you with no remorse, like a plate of oysters on the half shell, and you have to turn to your Aunt Judy and say, "Thank you, Aunt Judy! How'd you know that I always wanted this very CD-ROM video game?"

And your contempt for Alex Trebek and that little weasel moustache of his will grow and grow like a killer tomato, until it finally explodes in an afternoon counseling session in the wood-paneled 55th-story office of your psychoanalyst golfing buddy, two days before that big international derivatives meeting that you have been working on for weeks, staying late at the office and ordering in Malaysian food, trying not to hum along to that damned Jeopardy! theme song that haunted your childhood dreams and turned your half-waking days into empty, spiraling viruses of venomous decay.

I'm sorry. That's the brisket talking. Besides, mine is not a particularly revolutionary concept; the holidays are agonized over as the undoing of the modern world every Christmastime. Exposés with shots of crowded parking lots and long lines at the Macy's customer service window are all we get on 60 Minutes in December. This angle is different, though.

I am worried about what this effect is on us, the perpetually traveling family members of the holiday world. The holidays are the most cathartic pop-quizzes that we face as students. The expectations are high, the rejection stinging, and the psychic damage that they do is inalterable. We are not the celebrators of holidays; we are victims of them. The sacrifices that the modern student puts up with for all these days off are disturbing, often involving a stanky ride on a Cold War-era shuttle bus. Missing class for the Jewish holidays is tough, and as annoying as it is, I feel much more sympathy for students who have to study during Ramadan, an event that I am sure my gummi-bear-chewing ass couldn't endure. We students are the ones who will always be expected to pack up our dop kits, gird our loins, and hop on the rush-hour Long Island Railroad train to make it home for a family gathering rife with the competitive spirit of a Cincinnati dog track.

We are the ones expected to fly back to L.A. for Thanksgiving, to skip class and sit on the Greyhound to Pittsburgh for a family reunion, and to take the hydrofoil out to the Bat Cave to celebrate Hanukkah with Robin, Alfred, and the rest of the gang. Being a college student is easy. We get mini-fridges and the Student Advantage Monthly Magazine.

There are movies and soft drinks test market-proven to appeal to us in ways that are sure to be more satisfying than another helping of homemade cranberry sauce. (My Aunt Susan puts nuts and junk in her version, and it is just awful. It's like she's never even seen a cranberry, and she just starts throwing stuff in the bowl, hoping it will still be red when she's all done). The holiday season is one area, however, where the college student gets more royally shafted than Prince Charles doing a Richard Roundtree impersonation.

The endless questions about future careers, the inquiries about why there is no girlfriend, the concern over how skinny we've gotten, the worries about graduate school, the advice from grandparents who retired from waste management twenty-two years ago. Oh yeah, that holiday spirit is in the air.

Have a nice Columbus Day.