Page 15 of The Hanukkah Hoax
Somewhere during the past several frantic hours of planning, analysis, ledger reviews, customer orders, customer complaints, and the two social media posts she’d uploaded that had taken her four frickin’ hours to design, she’d accepted her fate and spiraled into a depressed heap on her living room floor.
Millions. Phoebe had millions of followers, on multiple platforms, likely fueled by a goddamn team of tech-savvy people working around the clock to pump out content about the Christmas Ball.
Knowing Phoebe, she’d probably already ordered merch and was actively sending out influencer care packages about her vendor offerings.
While Marisa had lukewarm coffee, a caffeine headache from said coffee, a combined total of forty-six social media views—screw you, algorithm—and Joe the bagel guy saying he’d make sure her flyers would be put front and center at his shop, right between the twenty-year-old lollipop dispenser and the coffee-can-turned-donation-bin for the local animal shelter.
In other words, Marisa had bupkis.
Her only recourse against spiraling out completely was indulging in the one thing her festive-season-loving heart could always rely on this time of year: artificially flavored and coincidentally Hanukkah-colored blueberry candy canes.
A treat she only ever felt comfortable procuring at Diner Depot beneath its cavernous roof of judgment-free resplendence. Plus, they sold hot dogs.
“And as far as birthdays go, why don’t we just keep it low-key this year, huh? You know, pretend like thirty is just another blip on the radar. Perhaps over the Bermuda Triangle. During a freak electrical storm. It wouldn’t happen to be a leap year, would it? Doesn’t weird stuff always happen on leap years? Stuff we should pretend never actually happened?”
Eden dove her hand into the popcorn bucket but still didn’t move an inch. “You mean like people getting to celebrate their actual birthdays for the first time in four years?”
“Sure, that! Weird stuff. So, maybe this isn’t the year to lean in so heavily on my birthday. I mean, I get to celebrate mine every year. How selfish is that?” Marisa tried to laugh, but the effect was ruined by a nearby spilled bag of cornstarch that had decided to atomize in her lungs, causing her to choke out the word selfish with an inappropriate amount of raspy inflection.
The sole benefit of her near-death experience? Eden finally backed off when Marisa almost coughed into her friend’s kettle corn.
“It might be, except that we’re talking about two different calendar years, let alone calendar months.” Eden narrowed her eyes. “Why are you being weird?”
“Why are you being weird?”
“What are you not telling me?”
“Nothing. Can we get my candy canes now?”
“Fine,” Eden relented. “You know, you’re the only Jewish person I’m friends with who has this as their Hanukkah tradition.”
“First of all, I’m your only Jewish friend period. And when you can’t stand black and white cookies or jelly doughnuts and still want to share in the magic of the holiday season with everyone else, your options are limited.”
Eden wrinkled her nose. “But they’re blueberry. You don’t even like blueberry.”
“Irrelevant. They’re blue and festive and exactly what I need right now if I’m going to make it through the next few weeks.”
And that was the crux of the dirty little secret her family had never been able to understand.
When it came to carving out a place for herself, Marisa had long ago landed on the fact that she was the blueberry candy cane. An anomaly, a fraud. An unglamorous holiday season misfit that didn’t quite measure up to expectations. A fruity treat when everything else was peppermint. The right shape but the wrong color, though still always coming back year after year so Jews like her who were embroiled in all the Christmas wonder could claim them as their own and give them the homes they deserved.
She was the Jewish girl who, after years of floundering and buying degrees she couldn’t bring herself to try on fully, had finally found her calling in the sugar-coated fascination swirling around Christmas and other celebratory confections. Her graduate studies couldn’t contribute anything to the joy that came with rolling out buttermints or making little marzipan gift-hugging teddy bears.
Which made her a big fat Frosty-the-Snowman-loving fraud.
Of course, it didn’t help matters that her love of candy making also coincided with a deeper and far more treacherous crime.
Despite her upbringing, as an adult, Marisa had become secular.
The word had been an unspoken stain on her adult life that had unleashed torrents from a wellspring of guilt, which truly had no bottom. She didn’t keep kosher, always had to look up when the holidays were, and couldn’t remember any of the reasons for celebrating the holidays beyond Someone tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat.
That wasn’t to say she didn’t have a love for her heritage, but explaining to her family that she always resonated more with the vibes than the plot was like a serial killer trying to convince Santa that a weeklong stretch with no brutal murders had to count for something, right?
Regardless, that never stopped her from buying every bit of Hanukkah merchandise the Internet had the gall to sell or getting swept up in the Festival of Lights, regardless of whether they were from a menorah or a twinkling strand wrapped around a Christmas tree. And blue-and-white Santa hats? She owned three of them, all with varying amounts of glitter.
Even though she had found her quiet happiness and port in the storm, it didn’t make her life any less exhausting.
Jewish guilt, man. That shit was a killer.
