Let there be lights, and let there also be presents

When my siblings and I were children, Hanukkah was a very big present-giving occasion, by which I mean that we children got tons of presents — mountains upon mountains of presents — and if we had to listen to our father’s off-tune rendition of “Ma’oz Tzur,” so be it.

But I’m in my post-middle-age years now, and know that Hanukkah has nothing to do with presents and everything to do with — a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and by the way, presents are a goy thing. The “Jewish Christmas,” not so much. And that’s because we Jews focus on the ineffable, the miracle of the light piercing the winter darkness, the flame illuminating spiritual darkness, the turning of the seasons from dark to light and back again, over and over, without beginning or end.

Nice try. I live in America, where accumulating bling is actually written into the Constitution, and this year, with uncertainty raging around us, the polar ice caps melting, the war in Gaza, and my very own hips no longer as happy as they once were, the one thing I’m counting on is a good Hanukkah haul. In fact, I’ve long since sent the Hanukkah Man my Hanukkah wish list. Whether or not the Hanukkah Man has actually read or considered my wish list is another matter, because frankly, most years the Hanukkah Man sends me something along the lines of: oven mitts. One year he sent me a salad spinner. I’m still processing. What’s up with that? Enough with the salad spinners and oven mitts. What I really want is listed below,

First Night:

I would like someone to invent a pain-free, risk-free, and inexpensive facelift, and I frankly don’t understand why such a procedure isn’t already available. This is a subject I’ve discussed at length with my my-age women friends, who all agree that it can be unpleasant to wake up in the morning, go to the bathroom to do your morning business, and look into the mirror only to see your mother — strike that, grandmother — staring back.

Second night:

On the subject of no longer being young enough to be hit upon by random shmucks at random parties that I no longer choose to either discuss or remember or, I would like Taylor Swift to stop. I mean it. Just stop already. The sparkly bathing suit outfits, the high-heeled boots, the long hair, the vapid, anodyne, fungible lyrics and equally vapid, anodyne and fungible tunes: put a sock in it, why don’t you? For one thing: what’s the point? For another: your pervasive presence in every media has ripped a hole in my understanding of what the world means, such that I am facing an ontological crisis that has me searching for meaning in such non-entertaining tomes as The Book of Job and Ecclesiastes.

Third night:

I’d like a redo of my college years. And if you could throw in my high school years, my grad school years, and most of my 20s, that would be good. Maybe middle school too.

Fourth night:

Grandchildren. Plural.

Fifth night:

I’d like household staff.

Sixth night:

On the theory of better late than never, I’d like the opportunity to tell the Mean Man to bugger off, only I’d be cruder than that. Who, you ask, is the Mean Man? The Mean Man is the man who, more than 20 years ago, when our eldest was 13 and our twins were 9, almost ran over my then-9-year-old son Jonathan, and when he didn’t, yelled: “Stupid boy.” We were in Hyde Park, in London, jet-lagged and hungry, and the Mean Man was on a bicycle. To the best of my recollection, as Jonathan clung to me, I let loose with the following Tiger Mother retort: “He is not a stupid boy.” Jonathan and I are still traumatized.

Seventh night:

I’d seriously like to be profiled in either The New York Times Magazine or The New Yorker. The reasons for this are two-fold. Okay, maybe three-fold. Four-fold? First, it would help up my literary profile as a writer of literary fiction that has not yet achieved the best-selling ranking of, for example, lots of people. Second, my dear friend Jim, a writer of southern literary fiction and a true pal, was profiled in The New Yorker — this would have been a decade or more before I met him — when he was in his 40s and laboring over his wonderful work in near poverty and almost complete obscurity. The New Yorker piece was called “Moby Dick in Manhattan,” and after I read it, I read all of Jim’s then-six novels. My thinking is: if Jim can trip over that kind of publicity, what am I, chopped liver? Third, my entire life I’ve been plagued by not-good-enough-syndrome, wherein no matter what, I just need one more little piece of something special to burnish my amazing marvelousness, such that the entire world thinks I’m awesome, and that’s because, you know, daddy issues.

Eighth night:

The arrival already of the Messiah. And if that’s too big an ask, I’ll settle for a cashmere sweater.