conflicts of interest
Last week, S and I bought a Christmas tree, a Douglas fir, 5-6 feet tall. It's round and shaggy and currently dropping needles all over our living room. The cat was initially skittish-- he hid under my bed for a while when we first brought it in, a maneuver he last pulled when a huge stack of books collapsed in the middle of the night and terrified both of us-- but he seems to have come around okay. We don't have ornaments but it's strung up with lights, white and warm, and it looks extremely cozy in our front window when I pull into the cul-de-sac, or sit and read on the living room couch.
The last time I had a Christmas tree in my house I was twelve. It was the winter before my Bat Mitzvah, my mom's last Christmas before she converted from her native Catholicism. It was important to her to give up Christmas as part of the bargain: lots of Jews buy trees and hang lights because they're pretty, because it feels festive, but that didn't work for her. The point was, she had made a decision and a commitment; the point was, Christmas is not, as the US of A would have you believe, a secular holiday, and it was no longer part of her faith. Being Jewish, I remember her saying, was in part about not doing what everyone else does. I tend to agree with her on this; it's important to me to push back on the idea that Christian observances and ideas are "basically secular," to push back on the idea that they are neutral and universal, when in fact what they are is common.
The tree, however, was my idea. When I brought it up S actually balked: "It won't make you uncomfortable?" she asked. No, I said. In fact, it was exactly the opposite: I wanted a tree very badly, and I needed her to serve as my plausible deniability, my goyische beard.
I don't recall particularly wanting a tree of my own before this, not enough that I thought about it, anyway. My general feeling about Christmas is that it's nice to have around, and also nice not to have to deal with personally. But we have this house that we're renting, and it seemed to me like a house thing to do. Plus for which, trees and lights are pretty, and I do associate them with seasonal cheer and coziness, and after the extreme weirdness of this year, these past two years, the idea of plunking down six feet of Oregon fir in the living room to announce that IT IS DECEMBER NOW AND WE ARE GOING TO HAVE A GOOD TIME was just too compelling to pass up.
And now there it is, making our house look more Christian than it is, not just to me but to the neighbors, too. I don't feel, like, bad about it. Just weird, I think? Just weird. I'm so used to part of being Jewish being the work I do to make myself visible to other people as such. It's strange to let go of that, even briefly.
But also, I see the lights on our house and on our neighbors' houses and it feels cheerful, all of us trying to push back against the darkness together. In that way, I understand Christmas and its decorations better than I ever have, I think: they're doing the same thing we're doing with our Hanukkiot, putting light in the windows to remind ourselves and each other that the sun won't always go down quite so fast. I catch the scent of the tree and its needles walking by and smell freshness, its piney sharp out-of-doors smell. It reminds me that we're all little animals; that, for all the ways we dress it up, we just want green things near us, signs of life and the promise of light and warmth to keep us company all winter long.
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Anyway, it's the end of the year, which is usually when I tell you a) how much money I made and also b) what books I read. We're going to start with money this week, because it's... not that interesting, honestly. I'm just under $49,000 for the year, which is less than I made last year and less than I wanted to make this year. (The difference is pretty much accounted for by the last third of my advance payment for Look, which I got when it published last spring. I had plans to make it up, but none of them worked out!)
$26,000 of that comes from ghostwriting; only $8,000 is from freelance writing. I made substantially more-- $15,000 total-- teaching private online writing classes and doing various small-scale editing work than I did writing for publications like BuzzFeed and The LA Times, which... is what it is, to use a very tired cliche. There's a whole essay to be written about how I've tried to make a career for myself as a writer and what has and hasn't worked but let me tell you: that part hasn't really worked! It becomes more minimal every year and I feel complicated about it! Ghostwriting is easier and more lucrative and I care about the novels more so... I guess culture writing is my vanity project now? Which is funny because financially speaking, the novels were supposed to be my vanity project, so. There's a Biblical sentiment for you to tie this all together: all is vanity, in life as in one's writing career, apparently.