Jewish Santa

Yesterday as I was going around school as Jewish Santa, I realized just how controversial my temporary occupation was becoming.

People just couldn't comprehend why I, a Jew, wanted to dress up like Santa Clause and hand out presents.

I mean, I see their argument. I should be proud of my Jewish heritage. I should be passing out chocolate coins and spinning dreidels. I should be home lighting a menorah or whatever it is Jews do during Hannukah. Some people who knew I was Jewish gave me weird looks, like I was some kind of traitor to my own kind. Like I was some kind of poser pretending to be Christian just so I could celebrate the commercial aspects of Christmas and ignore the religious part of it just like the rest of society.

I don't know. Maybe they were right.

I still don't understand why it has to be like some kind of battle between Hannukah and Christmas. Everyone knows that Hannukah could never really win, no matter how many times you say, "Well in Hannukah we get eight days of presents and in Christmas you only get one, so ha!" There's just that moment when you've got to get real and admit to yourself that you're never actually going to get presents on every day of Hannukah because your parents are reasonable people.

I was getting a little sick of nobody caring about Hannukah, or acting like I was trying too hard when I promoted the festivities of Hannukah in past years. It's like whenever I tried being a Hannukah fanatic, I got the "aw how cute she's trying to make it look like Hannukah is fun" look of pity. I mean, it's not like Hannukah isn't fun. I really do enjoy eating latkas and chocolate coins and jelly donuts, but aside from eating the food at home, there is no real Hannukah spirit to spread. Considering I absolutely love spreading festivities and spirit, this is unacceptable.

So this year I took a different route.

I wore a Christmassy sweater, a Santa hat, and extremely flashy Christmas socks (from my incredible sock collection- I'll touch on that at a later date...). I also carried around a white pillowcase full of presents and a "naughty or nice" scroll with random names written on it like "Ivanna C. Lebrate" (I wanna celebrate...) and "Obobob Bubblahub."

Despite a few looks from acquaintances, I had a good time. My friends who really knew me well knew not to question, or if they did question they completely understood my answer. Like I said, they knew me well.

I'd say the best part of the day was when I gave out my candy canes. Considering I stuffed five boxes of the good kind (Sweet tart candy canes all the way) into my santa bag of wonders and happiness, I got to hand out a lot.

My friend and I also decided to do a "finders keepers" thing during lunch, which was really exciting. The night before I had found a ton of random things around my room (stuff like crazy bones, slinkies, notebooks, a flamingo headband, and boxes of post-it notes) and wrapped them, then put a "finders keepers" label on it. We put these around the school during our lunch for random people to find.

It's kind of frustrating because I want to see their reactions, but it's also rewarding because I know that whoever finds it will be really excited. I hope.

In one of the classes, they had only left the room to do a lab in the staircases for about ten minutes, and we put two gifts in there. Apparently when they came back in and found them people went crazy and thought it was awesome.

This turned out ten times creepier than I anticipated...