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Tuesday, December 21, 2004
UD DOES CHRISTMAS
UD has the vaguely diffused holiday season you get when you grow up an assimilated Jew and marry a Catholic. Hanukah, never very firm in her mind beyond its association with gelt in fishnet, has pretty much vanished. Christmas is a big deal for her husband’s Polish family (much wafer-breaking), but less so for spiritually on-the-fence UD. No, for an aesthete like UD, the holiday season is about singing and listening to great music (except for the Hanukah songs, which can be really bad), walking with her daughter around chilly, greened Harvard Square (UD’s husband’s family home is nearby), and mooning over the beautiful photography books everyone gets and gives as presents. The larger culture of academic Harvard, into which UD has dipped every December for the last twenty-five years, has always seemed to her both enigmatic and stifling. She has been to many ponderous old houses inside of which campus eminences (John Kenneth Galbraith, Richard Pipes, Stanislas Baranczak, Harry Levin) reclined on couches and held forth. She was never particularly happy to be in these houses, all of them underlit, slightly cold, and full of anxious milling people, but she is grateful to have had the experiences. It is not, after all, Harvard’s fault that UD only goes up there in what Quentin in Absalom, Absalom calls the “iron New England dark” of Cambridge in December. |