Today is the day every Jew feels like a stranger in a strange land. I don't care how assimilated they are, how they call it a Channukah Bush, or they've married outside of the faith, and they are accomodating a spouse. This is not our holiday.
But that's OK, too, you know? When I was growing up in that small South Florida town, my family used to drive around, looking at all the Christmas lights. It was charming. The little Mediteranean Revival cottages, the mid-century not so much modern as ranch-styles were all duded up for a holiday.

There was magic in the way the palm trees glowed. It made it feel like a holiday.

In our store we always decorated for Christmas. It was a Christian town. We were in business. Christmas was big business in a dry goods store. Still is, you might notice. Big business is good for a small mom and pop business. We loved Christmas.

Christmas meant hard work for all of us. Only my Grandmother was exempt during the season. Curling ribbons, straightening stock, wrapping packages, making sales... that was the ladder we grandchildren climbed. On Christmas Eve we closed the store as early as we could gently expell the truly last second shoppers. There was a party for the employees, and the men and women who weren't family might just as well have been. These people had been in the store almost as long as my parents. After the party, the family would head over to my Grandfather's house, just a block away on the St.Lucie River. We'd all drink a toast to Christmas. I'd love to say that we then all went out for Chinese food, but there wasn't much in the way of Chinese food in Stuart, and I don't remember going to Frances Langford's Outrigger.

All my friends thought that I had no Christmas, being Jewish, so I can't count the number of trees I trimmed as a child. My sistergirlfriendgirl's family had wonderful ornements, little hedgehogs from England, based on Beatrix Potter's illustrations. Another friend's family had old glass balls, the ones people kill to collect these days. Sigh. It's never stopped, either, this Christian sympathy as though I've missed out on something.

When I lived in New York, a pair of women friends thought I needed to experience tree buying in the snow. So their present to me was a trip to the tree lot in Greenwich Village, picking their tree, helping to schlep it through the falling and deep snow to their West Village apartment where I would get to decorate the tree with them. It was just as magical a time as they wanted me to have.

Frankly though, I've always been in it for the grub. Lawdy. The grub in a Southern home at Christmas is why God invented ham. Redeye gravy and grits with butter the next day. Homemade biscuits. Butter. Cream gravy. Did I mention the roast ham? Exotic food and I still swoon for a good slice of fried ham with redeye gravy. Haven't had one in years.

I think that I embrace Christmas as the secular holiday my friends all tell me it's become. I celebrate Christmas vicariously through my friends, but I still won't celebrate it in my home. I am a Jew. This is the dividing point between them and us. I respect Christian belief enough to abstain from celebrating Christian holidays. I am grateful when they chose to share one of mine with me, and love to open my Passover seders to my non-Jewish friends.

But make no mistake, I am treating them to my holiday, letting them in on the Jewishness of the night. I am not trying to convert them. I would ask the same of the Christian Right.

I keep reading about Christmas in Bagdad, and around and about Iraq, and how the soldiers are giving out candy canes. I was asked by a business to click on a link to send gifts to the soldiers and children. The soldiers could get books, an amazing array of titles mostly having to do with politics, anti-war politics mostly, and how to get a better job, or prepare yourself for leaving the military. I thought that was a little cold, a little too much propaganda for those guys over there who don't want to be there any more. I opted for a rag doll for an Iraqi child, but at the same time, I felt guilty. As though I were one of the Christians trying to force a religious holiday on someone of another faith. Hey, little Iraqi kid getting a rag doll for a holiday you don't celebrate: I don't celebrate it either. Take the presents and roll with it.

RJ and MJ have an agreement: he celebrates all the Jewish holidays, and she has to celebrate Christmas and St. Patrick's Day with him. I think this is a great deal for RJ and told her so. She gets all her holidays (and trust me when I say that they mostly involve food) and the only two of his he wants to celebrate require giving presents and drinking to excess.

Back in the dawn of time, when I was living in NYC, the Village Voice had a contest to name Fran Leibowitz's first collection of essays. I read Fran in the Voice and I loved her. So I entered the contest.
"Joyce Maynard Is A Drip & Other Tales of the New Jazz Age" was the title of my submission, and surprising to no one but me, didn't win.

I hated Joyce Maynard, although I never read her first book, nor any of her subsequent ones, either, to tell the truth, but I have read any number of her essays, and despised them all. Ms. Maynard's claim to fame in those days, and it's a toss up as to whether that or her current one is more offensive to me, was that she was the precocious daughter of Harvard professors, who got a publishing contract at an absurdly early age, to write her memoirs of growing up in the 60s.

As David Crosby once said, if you remember the 60s you really weren't there. Neither was I, and if that punk bitch could bullshit her way into a contract, I didn't see why I couldn't, seeing as how I was funnier, smarter, and seemed to have done more drugs.

I bring this up because today I'm pissed about another annoying "celebrity" who has a publishing contract for a "humorous" autobiography. Paris Hilton. I know she's a cheap shot, but that's the point exactly.

I'm smarter, funnier, and about an infinity less a skank. So how come I can't get a contract to be a paid smartasscommenter on the state of the universe? I need to send some samples to Jon Stewart.... or at least my manuscript to an agent....

Any suggestions?

To the marketing geniuses at Burger King:

How DARE you give out free hand cleaner with every order (even just coffee) that disolves nail polish? Are you people mad? Do you know how much a manicure costs?
And here in Miami, home of the shallow and the vain, do you know how much it means to keep your manicure maintained?

So, yesterday, while the RLA and I were running around doing errands, I noticed that I had puppy schmutz under my nails. Knowing that I had those free BK hand wipes in the car, I opened one up and used it.

What a surprise to discover that my two-day-old manicure had the top coat dissolved right off, leaving me with pitted, matte nails on a few, but not all fingers.

I was livid.

But not so livid that I was unable to make the following observations about the drivers and driving rules in Miami.

The far left lane is now the designated "slow" lane. Where in my youth, I was taught it was the fast lane or the passing lane, it now seems to be where you drive if you are lost, unsure, under the influence of drugs, or simply can't bear to go above 25MPH.

The word "merge" in the merge lane means that the people in the lane you are trying to merge into are trying to make you merge into the guard rail.

Holiday spirit has come to mean a viciousness and meaness of spirit only dreamed of by Mr. Scrooge. People are ugly, irritated and irrational to degrees heretofor unseen in city known for its crabiness and bad driving.

But I have a puppy, and that makes everything better.

It's been a long six months of waking the RLA up in the middle of the night to say "I want a PUPPY". Or, in the middle of a conversation about something, anything else, asking "Can I have a puppy?" Sometimes I've even chanted it, like Bart Simpson asking "Are we there yet?"
But the universe unfolds the way the universe will unfold, and so, on my birthday I received an e-mail from a breeder who had no puppies, but had found one up in Port St. Lucie that she thought was a good, sound little girl.

A couple of phone calls later and the force of nature that is your narrator had made arrangements with the breeder, and finally broken down the RLA's resistance.

I present to you the newest member of the Shoes family: Miss Josephine Baker, or as she has now figured out, and comes to: JoJo.

It's occured to me, as I sift through the detritus of my home studio, that I really don't have to go back to work as a corporate art hack. I could change careers. No, really, I could.
The question, of course, is what should I be now that I have ostensibly grown up.

On the one hand, I'd like to be paid to be a smart ass. That means either doing stand up, or comedy writing, or taking over as the new, female, emergency back up Dave Barry. (Which I fully feel capable of doing.) I could sell my manuscript (finally). I could try to parlay this blog into a money making enterprise.

On the other hand, I would just adore going back to school to become a chef. I would not adore the long hours and back breaking work involved to become the oldest sous-chef in the worst diner in Miami.

On still another hand, I really would love to lock myself away in my studio and just sew and bead and make things. I don't even mind selling the things I make. Unlike the RLA, by the time I finish a piece of artwork, I don't want to live with it, I want it out of the house, preferably forever.

On yet another hand, maybe I should just get a part-time job at a Starbucks or Borders... you know, something where I could go to work and never have to engage my brain at all. The only down side I can see to one of those jobs is dealing with the public, and I hate the public. I'm not even too keen on people.

So maybe I should go to work as a vetrinary assistant, and make minimum wage, and swab dog poop for a living. Or not.

I dunno. Maybe I'll just float along in an undecided fugue state until something falls in my lap.

I'm officially old today.

Or not.

My mother, who is eighty-six, insists, when asked, that she is maybe twenty-one. This gives creedence to the quote by the immortal Satchel Paige, who once said "How old would you be, if you didn't know how old you was?"
Tonight, somewhere around 8:32EST, the earth and I on it, will hit the point where fifty years ago, I made my entrance.

The RLA, the noble dog Nails, Ming the Merciless Siamese, and even the koi, have been doting on me all day. So far I've raked in some heavy-duty love and no small piles of gifts.

I am not one of those folks who, when presented with an opportunity for gifts, demures and says I need nothing, I want nothing. Not this bitch. No sir. When there are presents to be had, I, like the Shrub his ownself, says "Bring it on."

They are indeed being brung. I have new fuzzy bunny slippers. I have a pair of truly lovely pink yard flamingos. I am wearing an amazing new necklace featuring a carved bone mermaid and turquoise.

My girl cousin who sends me so many jokes and political satire, sent a set of Kate Spade martini glasses. (Said girl cousin does know your author, does she not?) My sisterfriendgirl made me the most beeyooteeful quilt in pinks and greens and blacks and I've already taken a nap under it, so there.

Nope. As much as I may joke and complain about turning fifty, it beats the fucking alternative, and I can give you a list without even having to think hard, of all my friends who never made it this far. Cancer and AIDS, primarily. Leapin' made it to 52, and then went down in chopper over the Gulf of Bahrain. Gary finally got a job with insurance, and so went to see about that bothersome hemorhoid, only to be told it was colon cancer, and he was gone six months later.

Me? I'm older than I ever expected to be, and still not quite grown up. The cocktail party the RLA is throwing for me has a mermaid theme. I'm off to string up crepe paper garlands, and rearrange the shells and fishnets. Don't wait up, but maybe there will be photos tomorrow.