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crowds. Tickets are expensive. It’s like play-off seats for season ticket holders. Nothing is included in your basic package. Regular Friday and Saturday morning services are not well attended, but the chance to go to the big dance and spill your guts about the bags of Oreos you shouldn’t have eaten or your flirtation with the pool boy brings the masses.
    On Yom Kippur most Jews try to fast, so it’s a very long service filled with sadness and guilt and the rumbles of growling stomachs. At one point there is a silent prayer, during which you basically get a few minutes of solitude to silently say to God how you fucked up all year, and that even though all he asks is that you fast for one day, somehow you gave in and ate a little nosh on the way over to keep your strength up. Even worse, it was a Sausage McMuffin. (If only there were a Yom Kippur app that could read the minds of all those hungry, tortured souls: “I bought retail,” “I masturbated to that weather girl who wears the tight skirts,” “I ate pork rinds,” “I voted Republican.”) When the service is ending, the shofar (a ram’s horn) is blown, signaling the beginning of the New Year, and the masses go to someone’s house for deviled eggs, bagels, and lox, and then to the nearest Chinese restaurant. This is called “breaking the fast,” and it would be an incredible bonding experience if we hadn’t all been sneaking food all day.
    The next big Jewish holiday is Christmas. Everybody loves Christmas. Especially the Jews. Jews adopt Christmas and other people’s holidays because they’re more fun than ours. It’s not an equal playing field. On TV, for instance, you never see Have a Nice Hanukkah, Charlie Brown or The Grinch Who Returned His Presents for the Cash . And the music? “Bagels roasting on an open fire” just doesn’t cut it.
    Christians have warm, festive gatherings where the family comes over, they open their gifts, and they share a huge meal. Gentiles’ lives are a Hallmark TV special where the final scene is the whole clan singing “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” by a roaring fire. You can’t help but feel jealous. There’s a reason Rockwell never painted a Jewish family dinner. We never look happy! We need a makeover. For every Schlomo who loves his holidays, there are fifty other Jews who wish their name was Tim. That’s why so many of my friends have huge, beautifully decorated Christmas trees surrounded by piles of gifts. We drink warm cider and eat red smoked salmon blinis with green caviar on top, in Christmas colors. We even sing carols. We do this just to fit in. We bust our ass for Christmas, yet at Hanukkah we forget to light the candles by the third night. Hanukkah isn’t a sexy holiday. At that time of the year, I feel that I should be wearing a Jewish star on my sweater. The country is only 2 percent Jewish, marked down from 3 percent, and I just don’t feel a part of it for the holiday season.
    The only Jewish holiday that’s any fun is Purim, where we eat cookies stuffed with prunes. And you know why: to clean out the matzoh that’s been wedged in my ass since Passover.
    Passover: there’s another holiday that isn’t all it is cracked up to be.
    It’s a holiday when we celebrate … suffering. There’s a surprise.
    What makes it even worse is that Passover occurs at the same time as Easter. Again we can’t compete. Two thousand years ago Jesus is crucified, three days later he walks out of a cave and they celebrate with chocolate bunnies and marshmallow Peeps and beautifully decorated eggs. I guess these were things Jesus loved as a child.
    Passover commemorates the Exodus from Egypt. A fantastic tale. Moses frees the slaves who were building the pyramids, we’re lost in the desert for forty years, cross the parted Red Sea, get to the Holy Land, and we celebrate by eating cardboard and a fish called gefilte that is so lacking in flavor you have to cover it with horseradish and bitter herbs.