Tag: xmas

“I had a little dreidel …” ♬♫♪ (Sketch of the Week for Week 51 of 2025)

Last week was Chanukah, which means I had dreidels lying around, hence this sketch from life. If anything demonstrates my progress over the last two years of sketching, this is it:

In real life, a dreidel is a roughly rectilinear solid that’s basically a modified cube, each side of which is bears a roughly rectilinear character, inscribed squarely on that face. The whole thing has radial symmetry along a central vertical access (or else it wouldn’t spin).

In a drawing, there isn’t a single 90º, nor a single non-angled line. Drawing it accurately to life means making everything about it wrong on the paper. Two years ago that simple fact made me batshit insane; my stupid eyes saw 90º angles all sorts of places where they were not actually visible, and even when I convinced my eye to see what it saw instead of what it knew, my traitorous hands kept drawing the 90s they knew to be true in life, rather than the 85s and 95s and 142s the eyes could see from where they were sitting.

This time? None of that sturm und drang. I spun a dreidel, I saw a dreidel, it fell, and I drew:

A pencil sketch of a dreidel showing gimmel ג; you win all!

Tonight I’m told is Erev Kristmas. May it be a joyous one to those who observe, and a peaceful Nittel Nacht for the rest of us.

Just frontin’. I fucking know it’s Xmas; I’m a half-a-Jew by birth. I’m just bustin’ your balls.

please don’t hurt us

Merry Xmas! Please beware of “suicide cables”!🎄🔌🙅‍♀️

ANNUAL REMINDER:

‘Tis the season to hang your Xmas lights—and, for many people, to hang one strand backwards and instead of pulling it down, head to the hardware store in search of an “adapter” that is colloquially referred to as a “suicide cable.”

DO NOT DO THIS!

I’m not kidding around. If you don’t kill yourself with such an arrangement, you can easily kill some hapless person who stumbles across your work later.

A Holiday Tip for Gentile Schoolteachers with Jewish Students🎅🏿🕎

This is always a fraught time of year for grade-school music teachers: they wanna sing Xmas songs, most of the kids wanna sing Xmas songs. But they know that the constant wintertime Othering grinds away at the Jewish kids. (It’s even worse when teachers try to “include” you be singing the “Dreidel Song”; that song is crap, and we know it. The Xmas songs are way better.)

Back during the pandemic I eavesdropped on the most brilliant piece of classroom third-rail navigation I’ve ever seen in my life, and I wanna share it here again, for any that need help (esp. in what’s become an extremely fraught year for Jewish kids in America).

This was early in the pandemic, when our community was pretty locked down (my kids didn’t have in-person school for 400+ days). My daughter was then a third grader, and I was sitting nearby during her Zoom music class (we’ll leave for another day any discussion of the crime against humanity that was “grade-school Zoom music class”).

A few slides into the lesson, the teacher show a picture of an unremarkable middle-aged White dude, “Mitchell Parish.” 

Who the heck is Mitchell Parish? Well, he was born in Lithuania, and brought here by his parents, who were Jews (my daughter immediately perked up; Jews! Like us!) looking for a better life. Mitchell Parish was a popular songwriter in New York in the ‘20s, ‘30s, and ‘40s—and he wrote the lyrics to …

*advance to next slide* 

… “Sleigh Ride”!  

*kids sing “Sleigh Ride”* 

*EVERYONE IS A WINNER!*

My daughter felt seen, gentiles got their Christmas carol, and no one had to sing the goddamned “Dreidel Song.” 

So there’s the trick to getting to sing Christmas carols in public school in what has been the worst year for Jews since 1945:

Start out with a brief bio of the Jews who wrote your Xmas song

You could do a whole Winter Concert—featuring “Rudolph, the Red Nosed Reindeer,” “A Holly Jolly Christmas,” “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” and “Run, Run Rudolph”—on just a single bio slide: All four of those classics were written by the same Jew (the inimitable Johnny Marks, whose Jewish brother-in-law was the guy who created Rudolph to begin with).

(SPOILER ALERT 🚨: All your favorite Xmas songs were written by Jews; you’re welcome).

A Musical Xmas Gift for the Final Night of Xanukah! ♬♫♪🕎🎄🎅🏿

I’m a mixed Jew (i.e., one raised in an interfaith family, and raising my Jewish kids in one now). I’ve lived in the American Midwest for my entire life (which is kind of a double-Diaspora).

I think these songs—which I wrote and recorded nearly 20 years ago now—possibly capture that experience more purely than anything else I’ve ever written.

  • Another Dark Xmastime (FUN FACT: I wrote this during my first year as a fundamentally unemployable stay-at-home dad; for years my children believed it was an accepted part of the broadly accepted Xmas Music Canon.)
  • Dreidel Bells (FUN FACT: The beat here is an original GameBoy running an early German Nanoloop cartridge. Both voices are obviously me, but the filters for the robot voice badly overburdened my old iBook, causing significant lag–which is why Mr. Roboto struggles so badly to hit his marks.)
  • DreidelDreidelDreidel (FUN FACT: The beat here is a vintage analog Boss DR-55 purportedly once owned by Poe, crammed through a heavy-metal distortion stompbox.)

Merry Xmas! Please beware of “suicide cables”!🎄🔌🙅‍♀️

‘Tis the season to hang your Xmas lights—and, for many people, to hang one strand backwards and instead of pulling it down, head to the hardware store in search of an “adapter” that is colloquially referred to as a “suicide cable.”

DO NOT DO THIS!

I’m not kidding around. If you don’t kill yourself with such a arrangment, you can easily kill some hapless person who stumbles across your work later.