אַ ניקל פֿאַר זיי, אַ ניקל פֿאַר מיר

[sovay]

Apparently I can no longer re-toast myself a signature half pastrami, half corned beef sandwich from Mamaleh's without spending the rest of the evening singing the same-named hit from a 1917 American Yiddish musical. The Folksbiene never seems to have revived it and if the rest of the score was as catchy, they really should. (I am charmed that the composer clearly found the nickel conceit tempting enough to revisit in a later show, but that line quoted about the First Lady, didn't I just ask the twentieth century to stay where we left it?)

At the other end of the musical spectrum, spatch maintains it is not American-normal to be able to sing the Holst setting of "In the Bleak Midwinter," which until last night I had assumed was just such seasonal wallpaper that I had absorbed it by unavoidable dint of Christmas—it's one of the carols I can't remember learning, unlike others which have identifiable vectors in generally movies, madrigals, or folk LPs. Opinions?

Thanks to lunisolar snapback, Hanukkah like every other holiday this year seems to have sprung up out of nowhere, but we managed to get hold of candles last night and tomorrow will engage in the mitzvah of last-minute cleaning the menorah.

P.S. I fell down a slight rabbit hole of Bruce Adler and now feel I have spent an evening at a Yiddish vaudeville house on the Lower East Side circa 1926.

Comments

[yarrowkat]

i will be the outlier here then and confess i had neither heard, nor heard of, that song before today. as a general rule i run screaming from avoid christmas as a whole and especially its music, so this is perhaps unsurprising. if your regional theory turns out to hold water, i am also from the desert southwest where carolling is (i think) less of a thing than in New England.

[sovay]

i will be the outlier here then and confess i had neither heard, nor heard of, that song before today.

Thank you for your outlying data point! For context on my side, I was raised with a handful of consciously celebrated Christmas traditions in a not even part-Christian household, with results like a never-belief in Santa Claus and a knowledge of how to make a roast, a plum pudding, and a combustibly alcoholic eggnog. I don't regret my parents having made this decision, but it does mean that periodically I run into something like this song, where if it is out of the mainstream, someone is going to have to tell me, because I sincerely grew up thinking it was normal to light a twice-steamed and multiply brandy-soaked pudding on fire for Christmas dinner.

[regshoe]

*looks baffled* Of course it's normal to light the pudding on fire! That's the most fun part!

[sovay]

Of course it's normal to light the pudding on fire! That's the most fun part!

I mean, with that much brandy, it's wasteful not to!

(It's a little weird for an American Jewish family to make a Christmas pudding. Mine has my entire life. It seems to have started with my grandmother, according to my mother "because of friendship and the war": my grandmother was writing back and forth with a British flyer, and then when she married he thought it would be more appropriate for her to write to his sister, and his sister and my grandmother became and remained lifelong friends; my mother stayed with them in 1968 when she was backpacking around Europe and the UK. She believes the Lees may have sent the original pudding mold which endured for decades before the inner coating peeled itself off distressingly onto the pudding one year. They were definitely the source of the biscuit tin of memorabilia from the coronation of the Queen. The connection was lost with the death of my grandmother: I don't know if there are descendants and the letters are unlikely to have survived. The pudding endures, even the one year it actually did wick up enough of the brandy to start to burn like a sort of citron-peeled spirit lamp on its own time.)

[regshoe]

That's a beautiful story. I'm glad the pudding is still enduring.

[yarrowkat]

combustibly alcoholic eggnog is the best kind! i learned to make it as an adult for Thanksgiving potlucks. honestly setting things on fire for christmas sounds like a great way to handle the whole thing.

[sovay]

combustibly alcoholic eggnog is the best kind! i learned to make it as an adult for Thanksgiving potlucks.

I've never had eggnog for Thanksgiving! That's brilliant. Pre-pandemic, we used to make a mega-sized punch bowl of it for the afternoon of Christmas Day and basically hold an open house.

honestly setting things on fire for christmas sounds like a great way to handle the whole thing.

It's midwinter fire. That's the really important thing.

[yarrowkat]

o, eggnog around here is literally seasonal: October through early January. alcoholic autumn beverage of choice, whether homemade or storebought and then spiked.

midwinter fire is a good way to frame it.

[genarti]

We always did the flaming pudding too! And hard sauce, which as a child I detested, but I hadn't yet learned to enjoy the taste of alcohol. In our case it was as a conscious import from a Scottish friend, who came over sometime before Christmas to help make the pudding, and my father's liberal hand with the brandy had to be curtailed after one year had a memorable incident with a splash of flame and my grandmother's napkin. (All parties were unharmed, except maybe the napkin.) I don't think it's super common in this country, admittedly, but I do think it's one of those things that's fun enough that once you've done it once you're inclined to keep the tradition. Why not have some festive extra fire in midwinter if you've got the excuse?

[sovay]

We always did the flaming pudding too! And hard sauce, which as a child I detested, but I hadn't yet learned to enjoy the taste of alcohol. In our case it was as a conscious import from a Scottish friend, who came over sometime before Christmas to help make the pudding, and my father's liberal hand with the brandy had to be curtailed after one year had a memorable incident with a splash of flame and my grandmother's napkin. (All parties were unharmed, except maybe the napkin.)

Oh, neat! See above as to the origins of my family's, which I had to ask my mother about. We've never flamed anything but the pudding, but the pudding itself did try to kindle one year.

Why not have some festive extra fire in midwinter if you've got the excuse?

Exactly!