In these precarious times, I somehow find myself overwhelmed by memories...

... of how, when I was a little kid, the only Jewish kid in my class in '50s Brooklyn, our school had a Christmas pageant, rehearsing for which, as I remember it, took pretty much all our time for about a month. My facts might be untrustworthy here, but I’d bet that by any reasonable educational standard these rehearsals took up way more time than they should have. While as for diversity -- the only cultural diversity in Bay Ridge that I knew about was between us public school kids and the kids on the block who went to Our Lady of Angels, with their snappy blazers and thrilling tales of punishment at the hands of sadistic nuns.

Meanwhile, back at PS-102, we’d take places, girls on one side, boys on the other, and all in size-places in the auditorium, and sing the carols for hours until we got every bit of them right. Over and over again, tedious beyond measure except for my having to stay alert for the time when I’d have to NOT sing the dangerous words — not that my parents ever told me not to, and yet, I found out years later that I was hardly alone in this. In fact I’m guessing that we were legion, Jewish kids scattered across the five boroughs or maybe the whole English-speaking world, every one of us mindful not to slip up when that “O come let us adore him, _______ the Lord” moment came around again.

A year or so later, thanks to the GI Bill, my family moved to a newly built suburban split level in East Meadow, Long Island, where there were enough Jewish families in the development to insure that our school Christmas pageants were anodyne multicultural affairs (though still lily-white) with due attention paid to dreidel dreidel dreidel. Whereupon the whole awesome, terrifying, Brooklyn pageant — so proudly un-secular and so shamefully disrespectful of the First Amendment — became a strange, hazy, intermittently infuriating but also but oddly compelling memory.

Because the songs, stupid. The carols, the lyrics… We did “Adeste fidelis” in English and Latin, the cognates bouncing around in my bored, busy little brain — “regem angelorum” had to be king of angels, right? And of course “venite adoremus” was “oh come let us adore him.” How beautiful those “orum" and “emus" endings were… how awesome and almost infinite that other song was with its “Glor-ror-uh-ror-i-or-or-uh-ror-i-or-or-uh-ror-i-or-i-uh." And although all my internal translating suggested that I should also blank out the final, stirring “dominum” from “Adeste fidelis,” I happily, guiltily feigned ignorance, hoping I was fooling the Jewish God as I belted it out along with everyone else.

We did the whole story, the cruel innkeeper, the manger, the cold, bright night with that star, and especially the Magi. I wasn’t much for the holy family or the shepherds, but I loved those sad, sad kings out there in the cold, traversing (so much better than traveling) afar in their minor key — the same sad sound that inexplicably, frighteningly, but also beautifully echoed through “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen,” which sounded anything but merry to me, and not like the gentlemen really felt saved from sin or sorrow or anything -- not that I understood what all that saving stuff was about, but still.

The show must have wound down with “Jingle Bells,” but I only dimly remember that part. Just the sadness, the stillness, the awe, the tired kings, the majestic Latin endings to the words I struggle to understand — the precious, precarious sideways education of a cultural outsider.

All of which came back to me yesterday in San Francisco, during a peaceful pandemic Christmas Eve during this strange time out of time, when for the first time in years I remembered another of the lyrics I puzzled over. This one defeated me then, but now it returns in bits and pieces, “a thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices,” and best of all, the possibilities of the idea that “the soul felt its worth.”

It’s gonna be a tough few months. Like the not-so-merry gentleman, we’ll probably be living our lives in a minor key for some time to come. But today, the memories, the ironic internal life of a perpetual outsider — all of it kind of comes together for me. Merry Christmas, or whatever. And may your soul feel its worth, today and in the days to come.