By Jill Miller Zimon
Being Jewish, I love that my kids learn and understand that Chanukah and all the Jewish holidays are special unto themselves and best when not combined with other religions’ holidays. I never wanted to celebrate Christmas in my home growing up, and I have no desire to do so now.
Still, every year when Christmas comes around, I get smiley and wistful because of a cultural link made before I probably was able to read. This link, through a childhood friend and her family, has let me be exposed to Christmas and other holidays in memories I continue to cherish and, most important to me, in a way that has never been a threat to my own religion’s convictions.
In the spring of 1967 in West Haven, Conn., where I spent the first 12 years of my life, my mother signed me up for public school kindergarten. I would be attending Alma E. Pagels Elementary School, and my principal’s name would be Lottie Topp – names I always thought were the best ever.
I was 4 years old and, at that registration, we met a mother and daughter who, it turned out, lived across the street and up three houses from us. Oddly, though, we had never met before, even in the era of “I’m going outside to play now! I’ll be back in by supper!”
Our street looked like one in University Heights and west of Warrensville Road or perhaps South Euclid, north of Warrensville and south of Mayfield Road. The homes were separated by a few feet of side yard on either side, and you could almost see into your neighbor’s kitchen if the windows were at just the right locations in the brick. You certainly could hear your neighbors.
The manicured lawns, all tended to just the right height, shimmered green on summer mornings. In the wintertime, the slopes of our property, now shimmering white, provided an attractive nuisance for sledding.
All the trees stood tall, nary an inch above or below those on the adjacent tree lawns. You could tell that the neighborhood had been created all at once, within the 10 to 12 years before my family moved in.
Everyone seemed to like it that way. Although we would play and run from yard to yard and under fences, inevitably someone else’s mother supervised us at each home.
Most of the mothers stayed home then, although I can think of at least a few who went to work after we got into the upper elementary grades and definitely by the time I moved away to a suburb that was far removed from urban densities. It had longer driveways, more grass, privatized garbage collection and well-water systems.
Forty-four years after meeting the person whom I still consider to be my oldest friend – if only in terms of years we have known each other – I still find it amazing that we didn’t meet before that sign-up day. I always have suspected that this was because I attended a nursery school at a Jewish day school facility and my mother, who was 26, had just lost her mother to breast cancer (at age 52) and my great-grandmother had moved in with us. Rather than ask my parents much about this time period, my imagination has decided that making friends with the neighbors on behalf of us kids probably occupied very little of my mother’s time just then.
Finding this new playmate for me led to the creation of not only a lifelong friendship, but a lifelong cultural pathway to events and occasions that otherwise I never would have experienced. Truly, the word “friendship” betrays the intense connection Linda, her siblings, her parents and I have had with one another, likewise with all my family members, for more than five decades. Given that neither of us is yet 50, that really seems incredible to me, as in almost not credible.
Until I married and settled in Ohio, I celebrated more Christmases with Linda than I did any other holiday except for Thanksgiving, Passover and the two high holy days. Every December since, I still look forward to getting that wistful feeling aroused by memories of their celebration as the holiday approaches and the cultural, and though not necessarily religious, linkup through my past engages again.
Jill Miller Zimon celebrates with her family in her Pepper Pike home.
