Every kid has their own version of the running away story, and it’s always so cute. The kid, usually lashing out in anger and rebelling in the only way a tiny kid can, ends up not coming home from the bus stop right away or going into the woods for like an hour, and before his parents notice he’s gone he’s back, starving, crying, in need of a bath.

 

When I was three and we were living in an apartment building in Philly, I somehow escaped. My mother found me trying to push the elevator button so I could go buy some Nip Chee in the deli on the first floor, I had explained. Like, please. I know these people, mom. Buying Nip Chee is my jam. I don’t remember this happening, but I’m pretty sure when it was all said and done, we all laughed heartily, my mom probably called me a tricky little booger and gave me a noogie, and maybe we had a light snack. Hopefully some fucking Nip Chee were involved.

 

I learned something from the stories in this week’s Loop, though. Some kids are actually serious about running away. Sometimes running away is not a joke. Sometimes kids are like, “fuck this, I’m outta here.”

 

Love,

Lauren

 

 

 

 

 

Fuck It, I’m Outta Here

by Holly Tawney Luce

 

My family and I spent a few years living in a crime ridden, drug infested neighborhood in Cleveland. Bad for me but great for my mom and step dad. One morning I woke up and went downstairs to make breakfast for my 2 1/2 year old brother as I did every day. After all I was 6, and he was my responsibility. The little brat was especially annoying because he was starving. That was the point where I remember thinking “fuck it, I’m outta here”. My plan was to feed him breakfast and then break free of this shit. As he was eating I thought of things I would need to get me through a couple days. When breakfast was over I went upstairs to look for my clear book bag with the brown and yellow flowers. Soon after I found it, my bag was packed. I went downstairs and put my brother in his room and told him I was going to a friend’s house. There was a small part of me that was afraid for him because it was still early in the morning and the adults of the house wouldn’t be up until at least early afternoon. Fuck it, I’m outta here.

 

Since we didn’t have a phone, my plan was to find a pay phone and call my grandparents. Whenever my grandparents or an aunt or uncle would take me for a weekend I would attempt to memorize the route from my place to theirs because I always knew I would run away some day. I would remember things like, go right at the first street, go left at 7-11. I made my way about a mile from my house across the main intersection to the only pay phone I could remember. My attention to detail finally paid off. The phone was a bit high for my reach but I managed to bring it down to my level. You didn’t need money back then to make calls from pay phones. I knew you could call collect because my grandparents were always drilling their phone number into my head and told me to call collect if I was in trouble or needed anything. My grandfather answered the phone and was very happy to hear from me. Unfortunately I wasn’t allowed to see them very often because they were my real father’s parents and seeing my real father posed a serious threat to my step father, I guess. I told Papa to pick me up at the 7-11 and he arrived within minutes. When he asked me how long I could stay, I told him that my mom told me as long as I found a phone to call them, I could stay all summer. You know you have shitty parents when your grandfather comes to pick you up on the corner of a busy intersection and thinks nothing of it.

 

When we got to my grandparent’s house my grandma made my favorite lunch, a ham sandwich with lettuce. We spent most of the day watching TV and hanging out. After a while I went to the living room. The living room was at the front of the house and since they lived on the second floor, had a nice view of the street, cars, and even anyone who was driving a car. Some time had passed before a Cleveland Police car pulled up in front of the house. They sat in their cruiser for quite a while and then I saw it. They pulled out an 8X10 picture of me! I nearly shit my pants. I knew I was in trouble. I ran into the kitchen and told Papa that the cops were here for me. He immediately shoved me behind a door in the bedroom and answered the front door. I remember hearing muffled conversation and my grandfather telling them I wasn’t there. Before I knew it, papa got me out of the room and asked me to explain what happened. I told the officers that my “parents” were drug users and my step father was abusive. My grandfather begged for them to let me stay until it was all straightened out with my parents but before I knew it I was in the cruiser on my way back to the house that I hated so much. Fuck it, I’m outta here. After stopping for ice cream, we pulled up in front of my house. The officer went to the house to talk to the adults and made them promise him that they wouldn’t hit me or yell at me for what I had done. They must have agreed because within minutes, I was back in the house that I wanted to leave so badly earlier that day.

 

As an adult, I would have loved to hear my grandfather tell the story from his perspective. He was a hardened World War II vet who ruled with an iron fist. I never saw him scared until that day. I think he was more afraid for me and what I had to go back to. Even though they moved and changed their phone number after a while, it’s still the only number I have memorized, 30 years later.

 

 

Run, Child

by Desira Pesta

 

Growing up an outcast in Scranton, Pennsylvania, I’d often dreamed of running away and being someone else. I ran away often. My family owned a suburban home in our large town and sandwiched between other homes belonging to people we couldn’t stand, I felt trapped.

 

At school, I traversed the halls with my head down, picking it up only to answer questions in class, to be engaged with my studies and nearly nothing else. I ran away constantly to the minds and bodies of others in works of fiction and non, burying my head in books, sometimes laying out in the sun and finishing a whole novel in one sitting. I also ran away through my own works of fiction, by the time I reached sixth grade, I would complete one nearly full-length novel with characters who were on physical journeys, the journeys I would take with them. I played other people in my spare time as well. Years and years before Twilight and Harry Potter would debut, I hunted and escaped bites from my vampire neighbor who kept a garlic wreath on his door; and used my amulets and amethyst stones to procure magic in my neighbors yard. I was constantly bobbing up and down between fantasy and reality, tying real life into the dreams and fictions I lived out in my head. I sometimes had accomplices in my journeys, a best friend named Michael who was equally in need of escapism. I once ruined a brand new outfit after dunking myself in a pool of mud as I was tried as a witch in Salem and found guilty, my mother ready to punish me as I emerged from my dream.

 

The beautiful thing about my hippie family was our large property in the woods just a few miles from our home. We planned to build there one day, but until then, we just spent 2-4 days a week in the woods. It was here that I lived out my greatest escapes. I ran blindly through the fields of trees I knew as well as the back of my hand; and took off at lightning speed escaping imaginary captors, wicked warlocks, and sometimes just a life as an orphan. My parents let us roam far and wide in this woods, knowing we knew our way, but once, I went too far. For hours I walked and walked, weaving in and out of paths, following no clear direction and after the sun was lowering in the sky, I knew I was lost. Weaving this reality into my tale du jour, I decided that I would sleep in a burrow I would carve out, eat some of the plentiful teaberries and raspberries I knew the woods grew, and drink from the cool clear creek that undulated and turned through the length of the acreage we had. I was not afraid, I was an experienced warrior in the forests of my ancestors and I would emerge a hero at journey’s end. As the sun was setting, I grew not scared, but despondent, the thought that my parents would freak out broke my excitement and fervor for my adventure. I wasn’t afraid of the dark, or so I thought. Taking up screaming “hello!??” for a while, while walking in what I felt was the direction towards the car, I somehow reunited with my parents and made my way to my home, my fantastic journey thwarted by stoplights and radio banter.

 

A few months later, during the summertime, my sister, her friend and I set off on an epic adventure, following the creek that ran northward through our property and up to the next. We forged the creek, which sometimes poured down rocks and sometimes merely trickled. We climbed up steep embankments, braving the 90 degree angles using all fours to continue. At one point, the path grew perilous and the steep walls that we would have to cover to continue following were very difficult to cross. As I groped and footed my way across the wall, I started to slip.

 

Grasping for leaves and roots around me, I found no savior and tumbled into the cold pool of water below. Fully under and splashing, I emerged to hear my sister screaming for my help above, despite the fact that I had already reached the place she was afraid of heading. Her friend grabbed her and helped her to safety further on the bank and I made my way out. Fully drenched from head to toe, my thirteen-year-old self declared that I would get frostbite and I removed my pants. We decided that in efforts to save my life, we should head back. An hour later, we caught site of my father up ahead, chopping wood. Seeing my pants-less legs, he yelled “What’s wrong with you?” Weird people were living in the woods and I would be an easy target for foul play.

 

I proudly declared that I didn’t want to get frostbite and he brashly replied, “you can’t get frostbite in 50 degrees”.

 

I hated my town and left for college as soon as I could, but over the years, I have gotten a pain and it’s deepened as time goes by. Since leaving, I have found myself, found “my people” and ideologies and adventures in real life; and as much as I wanted to escape the place I found to be so unbearable as a young person, I come back to it. I miss it. I miss the things that plagued me as a child, that I wanted to replace. Our shabby chic home, I wished was more grand, the tractor I had to drive to cut the grass or the two ton duel wheel pickup truck of my dad’s that I drove to high school when everyone else drove BMWs, Mercedes, and Lexus’. We were different, I was different and it took running away from this place to make me come to a realization that this is just fine, in fact, it is awesome.

 

 

Running Away From Yourself

by Tiffany Brown

 

I can’t recall now what I was running from but I do remember that for me, at five, running away was an activity to be anticipated and I had a whole house of people who’d play along with my pint-sized shenanigans. Living in a high rise on the fifth floor and unable to reach the top lock, actually getting out of the house was out of the question. And the truth is I didn’t actually want to leave, I just wanted to inspire a chase scene, something to break up the monotony of playing with my Jem dolls and watching All My Children. With no real escape route I had to get creative.

 

There were two destination points: The Yogi Bear tent perpetually pitched on the terrace and under the coffee table. The tent was a triangular affair made of what was probably the same material used for shower curtain liners or disposable table cloths so while it was water resistant it was in no way warm. And since pillows and blankets were not allowed outside it also wasn’t the most comfortable place to sit and reflect or read (seriously even at five I could get pretty pensive). But it was bad ass and the astro turf that carpeted the terrace made the running away process feel more wild. The coffee table was generally a better place, it was in front of the television and if I was quiet I could usually get away with being up after my bed time. Plus it was never off limits (rain or snow meant I had to stay inside) and perfect for spur of the moment adventures. I’m not sure whatever happened to that tent (or the coffee table for that matter) but back in high school, living once again in the same apartment after having lived so many other places, I found myself able to recapture some of that runaway magic with a friend of mine. He had just finished building me a model roller coaster for my final physics project, a wonder at almost two feet tall and assembled into sections. And as we lay side by side on the deep green carpet I couldn’t help but wonder why I’d ever wanted to leave that space. Why at five, with my whole world organized for me, I couldn’t find peace, but at seventeen in a swirl of hormones I suddenly felt sated. Maybe it was nostalgia or carpet dust but in that moment I realized that trying to run away from home when you’re five is like trying to run away from yourself.

A few years ago on a first date, after about 1/4 of a glass of wine and during an awkward silence, I decided to tell the guy about Shower Belly. Shower Belly is a secret I had kept for more than 20 years—it’s my morning shower ritual of rubbing a layer of soap onto my belly and drawing pictures and patterns in the suds. I’ve done this every morning since I can remember and until that moment, nobody knew. I immediately felt as if I had betrayed a little of myself, and also, I should add, this was not a good dating tactic. (Now that the cat’s out of the bag, I don’t mind writing about Shower Belly so you can learn from my mistakes.) At one point, I considered starting a Shower Belly blog in which I posted pictures of my beautiful Shower Belly designs. When I finally figured out how to non-pornographically photograph my belly without soaking the camera, I realized something sort of sad. Although in my mind, for all those years, the designs had looked like beautifully intricate swills and patterns, pictures of ponies or waffles or whatever I was dreaming about at the time, all the pictures ended up looked exactly the same. A mess of blobby suds on my belly—which, by the way, wasn’t as toned as I had always imagined and I was like what the fuck this has been a terrible, dream-crushing day let’s put the camera away now. I still Shower Belly, though, and I urge you all to do the same. It’s meditative, interactive, and allows you to express yourself on a daily basis.

 

That doesn’t have anything to do with this week’s theme, Hanukkah. But since I’m a gentile, conjuring up a Hanukahh story would be almost impossible as Jesus turning water into wine. Which was truly amazing, wasn’t it? Goddamit, that man was wonderful. I would be so worried if I had not yet accepted him as my Lord and Personal Savior.

 

Love,

Lauren

 

 

 

 

 

The Motherboard Menorah

by Eric Herschthal

 

I never decorate my apartment for the holidays, but this year was different. The festivities got to me. Friends I saw recently kept talking about how they just bought a Christmas tree and spent the last week stringing it up with lights. Another couple I knew bought a mistletoe and wreath, the latter of which they stuck a picture of themselves kissing in the middle. But when you’re Jewish and single, decorating for the holidays isn’t so easy.

 

The first issue you deal with is, Who’ll see all this? Stringing blue and white lights, for instance, is a nice idea. But when there’s no one to show it off to, the lurking environmentalist in you starts to fight back—how much more energy would you like to waste this year? the voice in your head asks. How much more money can you waste on unnecessary shit?

 

And then there’s the inferiority complex. Jews and Christians like to compare which holiday is better: one night of presents or eight? Latkes or, for Christians, what amounts to another Thanksgiving feast? But those comparisons don’t really matter. After all, I haven’t met a Christian who didn’t get roughly the same number of gifts as a Jew, albeit in one day. And as for the food, what matters isn’t what you’re eating but who’s making it. A bad chef can fuck up anything. Anyway, latkes aren’t that special; basically, they’re tater tots.

 

The inferiority thing, though? That’s real. Scratch any Jew and they’ll tell you—this month isn’t really about us. We can blow up our dreidels the size of tanks and put them right next to your tree in the public park, but it’s painfully obvious that our efforts are in vain. Every Jewish kid past his bar mitzvah age knows that Hanukkah as we celebrate it in America—gifts galore, parties, yet another food orgy—is basically an ersatz holiday, a way for little Jewish Johnny to feel more like Cristina the Christian.

 

Yet even with all this knowledge, this year I felt like doing something. I would avoid the most egregious Jewish sins of celebration, of course, which meant there would be no silver colored wreath with a blue ribbon, nor, heaven forbid, a “Hanukkah bush.” Nor would I do the placid, agnostic thing and string up generic white lights.

 

But what would I do? How would I make my Hanukkah decoration feel authentic, some way kosher? The answer I came up with was uninspired but practical: I’d go to a nice Jewish website, and see what they had in store. I decided on The Jewish Museum’s online shop. The museum is a venerable New York institution, once a pioneer of Modern art and now a serious if sometimes stodgy beacon of Jewish art. On their website, a special Hanukkah section keeps things simple yet tasteful: they sell menorahs made by revered Jewish architects and artists, as well as humble $5 dreidels.

 

Since I picked up a dreidel four-pack from CVS the other day (at $2.99, you couldn’t beat it), I stuck to the menorahs. And only the ones under one-hundred bucks. My options were manifold: a clear glass block with eight holes drilled in a line, which you put glow sticks in instead of candles; a neon orange plastic mold with eight cone-shaped ridges; eight tiny clear cubes, which you could arrange in any archipelago you want.

 

I ended up buying what was called the “Motherboard Menorah.” It’s electric, and made from recycled computer circuit boards that requires nothing but a 9-volt battery. Online, it looked like the kind of whimsical, playfully ironic gadget you might find at Urban Outfitters, and it was just as cheap: twenty-five bucks. I was so excited about my purchase that I even spent an additional twelve unnecessary dollars on expedited shipping, so it could get to my doorstep in less than two days.

 

When the box finally came, I was beaming, which was something unexpected. I actually felt like I remembered feeling when I was kid, before my bar mitzvah, and Hanukkah meant the world to me.

 

I tore open The Jewish Museum box, pulled out my Motherboard Menorah and assembled it as quickly as I could. Aside from the gold and black Duracell battery, the entire lamp was green, something I didn’t even realize when I looked at it online. I didn’t see any light bulbs to attach to the stems, so I dug through the box, thinking I might have missed something. Turns out I didn’t. All I needed to do was flip the eight, impossibly small switches on the menorah’s backside, and, voila!, the menorah would be lit.

 

I flipped all the switches at once, and immediately, became crestfallen. The bulbs were all red. So when my menorah was in full bloom, its eight cherry lights lit up atop their green stems, it looked like nothing else but a Christmas tree. And so it was, the humble Jewish holiday I wanted so desperately to be unlike its big Christian brother became a pathetic pantomime of it.

 

 

 

Is Santa an Anti-Semite?

by Natalie Golub

 

As a twenty something girl living in New York, who also happens to be Jewish, I think I am pretty similar to my NYC counterparts. I use Yom Kippor as a diet tool, I ironically overpay to live in a lower east side tenement that my great grandparents probably worked their whole lives to move out of, and I can participate in any birth-right nostalgic discussions as well as the next guy. But believe it or not, New York Jews, there are actually places in this country where they don’t sell Matzah during Passover at the local grocery store, where Judaism is something that is learned about in an eight grade social studies class, and where babysitters very meticulously look in every room in your house and then ask fully perplexed where your family’s Christmas tree is kept.

 

I grew up in one of those places. In my very lovely hometown in upstate New York, my family was essentially the only non-gentiles as far as the Christmas lights could shine. There are many stories that accompany any childhood memories of those who grew up as minorities: some eye-opening, some painful, and some prideful. But there is one lucky circumstance that my sister and I faced, as the sole Jewish students in our elementary school, that is specific to Jewish minorities. And it is a privilege and source of power that us Jews should utilize more frequently.

 

I learned about him from my teachers, from my classmates, and even from the songs we sang in Mrs. Slenz’s music class. Santa Claus was a man I was educated about in school without any real differentiation from other distinguished gentlemen or historical figures, like George Washington or Christopher Columbus. But unlike the white-haired men associated with other holidays, Santa was different. Santa Claus was not yet dead, and in fact, he was very active. And even more amazing, Santa Claus made special visits to my classmates’ homes.

 

But something stunned me, each and every year, when Santa returned to our arts and crafts and classroom discussions. How did he know?! How did Mr. Claus (and Mrs. for that matter) know that my family did not celebrate Christmas? Why did he know not to waste his time sneaking down my chimney? I wanted those Christmas presents so badly. Sure I was given some Hanukkah presents, but no eight year old could argue that having to recite a Hebrew prayer in return for presents from your very un-anonymous parents was as cool as having a super happy, fat white man crawl down your chimney, eat your cookies, and leave you tons of presents while you were sleeping. And the stockings! Boy, I would have done anything for Santa to have left me just one stocking. I just didn’t understand why he was so discriminative. Neither did my sister. Was Santa Claus an anti-Semite, we wondered? Was he punishing us for being Jewish? According to all of the songs I learned in class, all I had to do was be good. It didn’t seem to be working.

 

My sister and I confronted our parents. Did people know about how prejudice the Clauses were? Shouldn’t children everywhere be given tree shaped Reeses’ and Puppy Surprises from a man who didn’t seem to have any shortage of goods?

 

And then we learned. Very, very seriously my dad told us something that we could never un-know. My dad told us that (WARNING: SPOILER ALERT)…Mr. Claus…did not exist. That it was a conspiracy. That parents everywhere were making up stories to their children. That all of our classmates were…believing in something that…was false. My dad made us promise not to tell our friends, and that it was very important that we keep this secret to ourselves. It was essential. Actually, to date, it was the biggest secret we ever needed to keep. We swore on our family’s mezuzah that we would not tell a sole.

 

The next day Maggie Barton stole my sister’s Nutter Butters from her lunchbox. My sister really had no choice. She used the only power she could to defend her honor and her ransacked lunch. There in the cafeteria, along a table lined with Claus believers, my sister yelled something unimaginable, something so painful its shock probably still lingers with its audience. “Santa Claus is not real!” she screamed.

 

Now I don’t remember how the teachers or parents dealt with the dispersion of this highly guarded knowledge. One can imagine that the damage control would resemble Kim Jong il defending the discovery of MTV, or Blanket Jackson learning that dark skin is a dominant trait. Either way, I think there is a lesson here. Jewish children have a lot of power. In a moment of weakness, threat, or just plain meanness, they can become personally responsible for ruining a child’s belief in magic, hope, and goodness. They can kill Santa Claus. So, I write this not as a warning for Jewish children to be more careful of their distribution of knowledge. I write this with a spoonful of advice for Christmas enthusiast parents: your children should be nice to everyone, but they should especially be nice to the their Jewish classmates. You may not believe that we are the chosen people, but we have been inadvertently chosen to keep a whopping secret.

 

 

The Best Part About Hanukkah Is the Part You Don’t Know About

by Scott Egolinsky

 

All parents teach their children not to lie. And all parents teach their children how to lie. And the first lie Jewish parents teach their children to tell is: “Hanukkah is even BETTER than Christmas because WE get EIGHT days of presents and THEY only get ONE!”

 

Even as a six-year-old, I knew that was total horseshit.

 

Sure, the first or last night of Hanukkah might bring a Big Wheel or Nintendo, but those other seven nights? Socks. Or chocolate coins. Or worst of all, a charitable gift to some poor people. Charity, seriously? Bitch, what part of “Transformers” don’t you understand?!

 

Thanks to 8-gajillion TV Christmas specials, all Jewkids know that you goyim wake up on Christmas morning to thousands of toys under your trees, put there magically by some jolly (though clearly anti-Semitic) fat man, a literal orgy of toys. And no, I’m not using “literal” wrong when I say “a literal orgy,” I mean you’re surrounded by thousands of toys and multiple naked adults having sex with each other. THAT’S HOW GREAT CHRISTMAS IS COMPARED TO HANUKKAH.

 

Slowly though, through much scholarly learning and years of psychotherapy, I’ve come to recognize the kick-assy-ness aspects of the Hanukkah story. The first step is to acknowledge that we’re never going to win on the gift front. Just admit defeat and pretend to rise above the grotesque materialism that the holiday season has become, no matter how badly you want someone to buy you that MacBook Air.

 

The problem is that most Jews don’t really know a thing about their own holiday. Jewish education in the US tends to drop off at about a fifth-grade level, but you only really learn the good stuff when you’re older. To use a secular example, sure we all learned in grade school that George Washington could never tell a lie and had wooden teeth, but it wasn’t until high school history that we learned how he also bought and sold black people.

 

So here are the Top 5 things you should know about Hanukkah that you don’t but should:

 

5. Jews invented guerrilla warfare. The thing that Hanukkah actually celebrates is not some bogus “miracle” of one day’s worth of oil lasting eight days—which anyone who’s driven their car on empty for 30 miles before filling up knows is really not that big a deal—but that a tiny band of non-professional warriors (the Judean Maccabees) repeatedly defeated the greatest standing army in the world at that time (the Greek-Syrian Seleucids). And they did it not through head-on combat, which would have been suicidal, but by inventing guerrilla warfare: luring the enemy into narrow passes and cutting them down from above. To this day, military historians still study their tactics. And it’s why that Nazi Mel Gibson’s Maccabee movie is going to be both so great and so bad for the Jews.

 

4. War elephants. Did I mention that the Seleucids had frickin’ war elephants?! War elephants were the M1A1 Abrams Tanks of the Second Century B.C. Try to imagine this scenario: you’re standing there holding a spear, you’re barely wearing enough clothing to cover your little Willy Wonka, and a humongous monstrosity with tusks is lumbering toward you, shaking the ground beneath your feet, with three guys on its back shooting iron-tipped arrows at you. Not only don’t you run away but you attack, stab the belly of the beast, and bring the whole thing crashing to the ground. That’s exactly what one of the Maccabee brothers, Eleazar, did. Granted, the elephant landed on him and squashed him to death. But still, I’ll take that hardcore imagery over some adorable barn animals staring wistfully into the eyes of a newborn any day.

 

3. There is no God. The word “God” does not appear anywhere in the Book of Maccabees (I Maccabees). Try to understand how kick-ass that is. These superstitious, religious, first-century B.C. anonymous authors didn’t even think to write, “Thank God we beat those bastards all by ourselves.” They purposely omitted God’s name, as if to say, “This was a man-made miracle by our own blood, sacrifice, and kick-ass-itude.” I’m paraphrasing. But considering that today at least half of American Jews don’t believe in the God of the Bible, we should be playing this shit up big time.

 

2. Coins. Ask an actual historian or archaeologist whether the Maccabees really existed and they’ll say, “sure.” How do they know? Because after the Maccabees took power, those fuckers did what any normal person would: they minted coins. Hanukkah really happened. Did Jesus mint coins? No, Jesus never minted coins. Now archaeologists are stuck trying to prove that the historic Jesus even existed. Did Jesus’ legacy extend across the centuries to cover the entire globe and touch the lives of billions of people, while there are only about as many Jews in the world today as there are Sikhs in India or Coptic Christians in Egypt? Sure. BUT WE HAVE COINS damn it.

 

1. Forced circumcisions. After the Maccabees won the first-ever war for religious freedom in recorded history, they rampaged across the land, lopping off the foreskins of all the uncircumcised males who might have bought into the Greek way of living, and thus ensuring the continued adherence to Jewish ritual law. The Maccabees were religious fanatics and zealots, the Taliban of the Second Century B.C. Yet if they didn’t win, there would likely be no Judaism, Christianity, or Islam today. And it all came down to dick cutting. So as my Christian friends and neighbors gather under the mistletoe to sip their eggnog this year, I encourage you to take a moment and give thanks, for there would be no Christmas cheer or good will towards man without the Jews’ proud heritage and our obsession with dick. You’re welcome! Happy Holidays everybody!!