Reading List: If Christmas Were Forever

I wish Christmas lasted forever. Okay, maybe not forever, but at least a week. I try to make this a reality by visiting different family members and friends and exchanging gifts during the week between Christmas & New Year’s, “forgetting” these gifts and having to revisit aforementioned friends, listening to Christmas music longer than conventionally appropriate, and supporting my mother as she attempts to keep our Christmas tree alive until March. I gripe and groan with everyone else when Target sets out its holiday decor the day after Halloween, but secretly I’m thrilled. So you’ll understand that this week’s reading list is devoted to the holidays. I’m just not ready to let go.

1. “High for the Holidays.” (Isaac Fitzgerald, Buzzfeed, December 2013)

If by some freak accident you haven’t stumbled across Isaac Fitzgerald’s personal essay about hiking Mount Kilimanjaro with his family, now you have no excuse. It’s a beaut.

2. “Egyptian Christian family celebrates holiday, free from persecution.” (Lane DeGregory, Tampa Bay Times, December 2013)

A Coptic Christian family living in Florida gets to celebrate Christmas without danger — unlike last year. Human interest wizard Lane DeGregory reports.

3. “Christmas for Jews is the Greatest Holiday.” (Marc Tracy, New Republic, December 2013)

It’s more than an average Wednesday and less than “Christmas Envy”: “A day on which we derive more enjoyment—schep more naches, if you will—from standing apart than from blending in; from being unconventional, not conventional.”