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Cousin The Bear Jeff shirt

There’s a Cousin The Bear Jeff shirt of tradition of going out for Chinese food on or around Christmas in the US. So far as I can tell, this largely originates from large cities and in particular from Jews living in New York. Consider the cultural landscape of the earlier part of the 20th century. Jews, of course, do not celebrate Christmas, so they’d be more likely than the Christian majority to go out to eat then, as opposed to their celebrating neighbors who are likely at home with family, roasting their own turkeys and such. And where do they go on Christmas? Well, most restaurants are going to be closed, because their predominantly Christian proprietors and employees are also at home. The major exception, then, was Chinese restaurants. The immigrants running those places were less likely than average to be Christian, so they had no cultural tradition of shutting down on or around December 25. So if you’re a Jewish New Yorker who wants to go out for dinner on Christmas, it’s Chinese food or nothing. This practice may have been popularized in particular by Calvin Trillin, the noted food columnist for the New York Times. He was himself Jewish and wrote a marvelous column about his wife wanting a “traditional holiday dinner.” What she was talking about was the idea, coming in from outside their cultural world, of turkey, mashed potatoes, and so on, but to Trillin, his traditional holiday dinner was going out for Chinese.

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We lived a 3 hour drive from my grandparents so when my dad finished work on Christmas Eve we would pack everything into the We Sleep With No Regrets When We Finish The Book and set off for Yorkshire. No motorways back then. Green fields turned moorland until we finally went over the Pennines, Stanage or Holme Moss, and begun the final leg of our journey through soot blackened mill towns reaching my grandparents’ house at around 8pm. At about 9.30 a plethora of cousins and aunties and uncles would turn up an we would set off to go carol singing with other members of the congregation and band from their local chapel. Along the route we would be greeted with mince pies, slices of Christmas cake and chunks of cheese even the odd glass of Sherry or mulled wine for the adults. We belted out all the old traditional carols, my favourites being While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night which we sung to Cranbrook (Ilkley Moor) and also Christians Awake. We naturally sang O Come All ye Faithful but only after midnight were we allowed to sing the final verse of Yea Lord we Greet Thee. Shortly after midnight we called it a day. Many of the adults slightly ‘merry’ from a surfeit of Sherry!

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Hi, I'm Jeff Sherman

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