The Little Lord Cheeses

In the winter of 1965, the year I turned eleven, I turned my back on the Jewish people.

My sister and I were bored. Mom said to go for a walk, surely counting on the fact that we wouldn't. But it was the last days of winter break and we had nothing to do, so we put on our sneakers and hit the streets to check out the goings-on in North Hollywood. 

We walked without talking. Suddenly, Karen stopped dead in her tracks.

“Look,” she whispered, and pointed to a long driveway in front of us.

I squinted but didn’t see anything, which is not surprising since my eyesight is, like, twenty/five billion, and I refused to wear my glasses back then.

Karen pulled us both down into the bushes.

I held my breath. I was a hand-wringer by nature, and crouching down in a stranger’s pink oleander bush was almost more danger than I could bear. I felt a sharp elbow in my side.

“Look!” She whispered.

A blonde man in gray pajamas and a short blue robe was walking barefoot towards us, down his long brick driveway. He was carrying two paper bags of trash in one hand and a small blue-flocked Christmas tree in the other.

“Do you see who that is?” my sister whispered. I squinted harder as he came closer.

James Franciscus!

Blonde, dreamy, goyische, Mr. Novack from TV!

I felt all watery and jittery and nauseous as a hormonal revolution awakened within me. I was still a few years away from the mortifying self-consciousness of adolescence that would plummet me into insecure paralysis, so as I crouched in the bushes that afternoon feeling the first stirrings of infatuation, I was blissfully oblivious to the weird gap between my front teeth, my hairy legs and thick unibrow, and the fact that at eleven years old I was already five foot five and had more than a slight mustache.

I was staring into the blue eyes of James Franciscus!

I ovulated on the spot.

He tossed his garbage bags into a tall metal trashcan, leaned the Christmas tree against the curb and turned back up the driveway.

Karen flashed me a smile that sent my radar to high alert. Oh good God, she had an idea. I felt a pain in the place that would soon be my first ulcer.

"Help me carry it.” 

The Christmas tree?  No, no, no, dear God, no. No.

“Okay,” I said.

Such is the power of a big sister.

We schlepped the tree home and hid it in our backyard, deep in the yellow and red flowers of the lantana bushes that grew thick in the Los Angeles sunshine. 

Mom was starting to make latkes for the family Chanukah party that night, and the smell of fried onions and potatoes filled me with hunger and guilt and fear. The Jewish holy trinity.

 

Karen and I went into our bedroom to collect treasures that seemed Christmassy. Beads, buttons, our party shoes. We had no idea, really. We brought it all outside to the tree.

I was kind of sketchy on the actual Christmas story but I knew the main characters. I draped Barbie, Ken and Midge – the three wise men - in tin foil and gave them gifts of gold-wrapped chocolate Chanukah gelt for their baby. I set out ivy and juniper leaves for straw, and placed my pink sponge hair curlers on the leaves for their beds. Karen put out a walnut shell for the baby Jesus, an idea from the Thumbelina story we loved.

The family Chanukah party began at sundown when the grandparents and cousins and aunts and uncles arrived.

When the grownups were settled around the Schnapps and latkes, I tapped my cousin Andrea on the shoulder and motioned for her to come with me.

"Don't tell the babies," I told her, referring to the other cousins who are, like, seven months younger than I am. Karen opened the back door and we brought Andrea into the yard.

The other cousins, smelling danger and exclusion, followed Andrea. They filed out into the dark yard one by one, and stood with us. I ceremoniously parted the lantera bush and unveiled our tree.

It was a truly awesome moment. Karen and I, already reputed to be the naughtiest of all the cousins, ascended to Jewish sainthood at that moment. A Christmas tree! 

Feeling the spirit, we started singing “Away In A Manger”, which was a song we all knew from public school, but when we got to the words “the little Lord Jesus”, I stopped. Were we even allowed to say Jesus' name???

“Cheeses.” I said. 

"What?"

“Cheeses. We’ll say cheeses instead of Jesus. It sounds the same.”

My sister nodded approvingly.

“Away in a manger no place for a bed….” All the cousins sang softly, our young voices filling the night, “the little Lord Cheeses lay down his sweet head…”

After a while, I looked up into the living room window of my house. Our menorah sat on the sill, its candles burning brightly. In the glow I saw my mom standing in the living room, playing her guitar.  Those were the years when my mother’s guitar playing and Jewish folk singing were a source of mortification for me and I distanced myself from anything my mom did. Those were the years when I was careful in public not to use the Yiddish words we used at home, like lokshen and kepele, the years when I begged my mother not to give me tuna fish on matzo during Passover. Those were the years I wanted to fit in, to be a part of a smiling, blonde family from a Christmas card. That was long before I grew up to borrow my mom’s colorful ethnic earrings, use Yiddish words in public and – to my own children’s mortification - embark upon my own career as a guitar-playing Jewish folksinger.

We stood in the darkness of the backyard, shivering in the chilly December night. I covered the walnut shell with a Chanukah napkin, wishing Baby Cheeses a good night. Barbie and Midge and Ken hunkered down into their sponge curler beds and went to sleep.

The cousins, cold and tired, went back into the house to finish off the latkes but my sister and I sat for a little while longer, adoring the scene, eating the chocolate Chanukah gelt and gazing up at the stars, breathing in the thick, spicy aroma of the lantara flowers around us.