Confessions of an Anarchist Decorator and Christmas Tree Jew
Essay
By Emily Weinstein
Published: November 21st, 2005 | 3:11pm
I am an anarchist with a dirty secret: I think about throw pillows. A lot. For years, I have suspected that my decorating sensibility is evolving faster than my impetus toward political involvement. I used to feel guilty about this, but now I think it's a good thing. I will be fully realized as a human when I am able to dovetail my two passions — human liberation and home decoration.
When I was very young, I was a liberal, but in college I learned that liberals are just guilty capitalists, and I was, in fact, a Marxist radical. Then I learned about anarchy, a philosophy eschewing institutions of all kinds that in its violent incarnations condones the smashing of unsightly franchise restaurants and chain superstores. A political philosophy with an aesthetic sensibility! I was enthralled.
The problem is that my insane domesticity often gets in the way of my loftier goals. In high school, I nearly failed calculus but never failed to organize my t-shirts by color. In college, I churned out an unreadable hundred-page thesis from an attic room whose well-placed lighting and innovative wall art was the envy of all my friends.
Now my lengthy to-do lists remain undone while our kitchen grows kitschier. The only tasks I ever get to check off are ones like "buy tiny suction cup that keeps razor on shower wall" or "buy sponge with hollow handle that also holds detergent." Some days I can't face trying to expound on why we don't really live in a democracy, but prowling my neighborhood looking for non-smelly discarded furniture is always an appealing venture.
So now I'm an anarchist who reads the entire "House & Home" section of The New York Times but often skips the international news. An anarchist who at this moment has a wall full of nail holes form moving her pictures around seeking their optimal locations. An anarchist who once spent her last twenty dollars on a matched set of drinking glasses and an enormous bottle that she turned into a lamp by filling it with Christmas lights. An anarchist who seeks the same fascistic order in her closet that she is trying to dismantle in the world at large.
I'm terribly guilty about all of this. I'm afraid that while I am decorating, we will be forced to endure a fourth and fifth Bush administration. The Bill of Rights will completely erode while I am fixating on the right area rug; the revolution will fail to materialize, in some small part, because I was looking for those light bulbs with the flame-shaped tip but the normal-sized screw-base.
It's a good thing I'm so guilty, because there's very little else that makes me a practicing Jew. It turns out that in addition to forsaking my political goals in favor of decorating, I'm also willing to forsake my heritage.
My roommate/best friend Rebecca and I, both raised atheists, maintain a staunchly secular existence in our well decorated home. We were in perfect agreement about the terms of this existence until she decided she wanted a Christmas tree. "No!" I overreacted. "We can't have a Christmas tree! We're Jews!"
I don't know where this came from. I've never understood why some Jews are horrified when a well-meaning Christian friend invites them to a tree-trimming party. Much as I am no longer certain that a few bare breasts in Playboy is really the epicenter of misogyny in our society, I am dubious as to whether a coniferous tree can really threaten "3000 years of beautiful tradition from Moses to Sandy
Koufax" as Walter Slobcheck puts it in The Big Lebowski. For some reason, however, I felt that we should not have a Christmas tree. Just because we don't practice our own religion doesn't mean we should practice someone else's. Isn't that the point of being an atheist anarchist?
But then I saw the tree for what it really was — not a symbol of a religious holiday-turned-global-consumer-orgy, nor the senseless murder of an evergreen being, but a decorating opportunity involving Christmas lights. I relented.
Walking in Manhattan one December night, I passed a man selling tiny Christmas trees. They were $10. "They're from Canada," said the vendor. "We're Jewish," I said. "It's our first Christmas tree." "I'm half Jewish!" he exclaimed. "You can have it for five." I took my tiny Canadian-Jewish Christmas tree on the L train, where it lit up the eyes of the usually impassive hipsters. As I walked home on Metropolitan Avenue, strangers waved at me and I waved at them. "Merry Christmas!" I shouted. "It's my treeeeee!" I set the tree in a frying pan full of water in the kitchen, wound it with lights and woke up Rebecca to show her. We spent the entire next day decorating the tree obsessively. Having no normal Christmas ornaments, the tree instead became a kind of shrine to the year that was. We festooned it with earrings who had lost their mates, small stuffed animals hanging eerily by their necks, several airline-sized bottles of liquor, a joint, some wilting daisies, and about five Euros worth of now-defunct European currency. At the top, in lieu of a star, we put a postcard of Woody Allen, to establish the tree's Jewish identity.
We spent many a December night sitting in its warm glow. There was only one problem — we could not, for the life of us, figure out how to make the lights stop flashing. They flashed in all kinds of complex patterns, but there was no switch on the cord to set them to "steady." This enhanced the tree's mysterious, alien quality. We would watch it like an unfamiliar animal to see what the lights would do next, especially after we smoked the ornamental joint.
"I bet if we were real Christians we'd know how to turn those off," I told Rebecca. "I told you there was a reason Jews shouldn't have Christmas trees."
Emily Weinstein writes the hysterically funny, highly personal and deeply insightful blog superlefty.com, read by daily by dedicated dozens of strangers from around the world. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY
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