FRESH YARN PRESENTS:

The Christmas Secrets
By Valerie Ahern

On Christmas Eve 1997, my brother Paul and I were back in our hometown, Austin, and we went to his friend's family home. Several of us sat around that night, discussing the holiday and our various traditions. One guy, who I'd never met before, said to my brother, "Your family's not very traditional, is it? I mean, your parents aren't even married."

I scowled at the ridiculous statement, waiting for Paul to put this rude person in his place. But instead, my brother just nodded. He recounted the story of how, about five years earlier, it had occurred to him that he didn't know anything about his own parents' wedding, so he asked my father when and where it had taken place, and my father told him...it hadn't. This was news to me.

With great difficulty, I tried to hide my shock. My cheeks were hot, my head spinning through the reel of my life, as I tried urgently to incorporate this new fact into everything else I'd ever been told. My parents never celebrated an anniversary, but I always thought that was because they were just not very sentimental. And come to think of it, I'd never seen any wedding photos or heard any mention of the event, either. I suddenly felt like such an idiot, not having put this together. And now to be informed of my lovechild status by my brother's friend's sister's boyfriend? Humiliating.

I spent Christmas Day seething. As WASPs, my family's approach to conflict was not to discuss it. The bigger the problem, the less discussion it deserved. So something like this? Not a word. Actually, we aren't even really WASPs. My father is of Irish Catholic descent, and my brother and I were raised in sort of a generic, non-religious, vaguely counter-cultural way, rejecting a lot of traditions -- apparently including marriage. All that with an added dose of WASPy non-communication.

So, in true faux-WASP style, I avoided mentioning this historical discrepancy to my mother, much less unleashing the grilling she deserved. I figured now that it was out in the ether, and my brother knew that I knew… well, I thought she might get around to telling me the story. I certainly did not expect what happened a couple of Christmases later.

In 1999, on the last night of my holiday trip to Austin, my mother and I were alone in the kitchen. I was about to leave the room, when she stopped me.

"Yes?" I said.

She hesitated. "There's just something I... I want to tell you. It's really hard. I don't know why it's so hard..."

This was not like my secretive mother to build up to any statement with that. I knew this had to be big. I wondered if it had something to do with her phantom wedding. I sat down across the table from her. "What is it?"

"I was always told never to say this to anyone, so I guess it's just ingrained in me, but lately I've been wondering, am I just going to take it to my grave?"

What...what?

"My parents' families are both Jewish."

Ho-ly shit. I had to let this sink in. If her "parents' families" were Jewish, then she was, which would mean... I'M JEWISH??!!

Suddenly being born out of wedlock was on the back burner. And, it appeared, I was owed about 232 Chanukah presents.

She went on to explain that when she was a kid and her family left New York City and moved to Pasadena, around 1945, they reinvented themselves. They started celebrating Christmas, and never revealed to their new friends any information about the family and culture they'd left behind.

I tried to sound as understanding as I could, knowing it was very hard for my mom to tell me something like this. But it just didn't make sense. Why did she deprive me of this knowledge for so long? Granted, it might've been a little inconvenient when we lived in a backward, Baptist-only town in West Texas when I was a kid, but now that I lived in L.A., and had many Jewish friends whose cultural identity seemed very important to them, this is something I really would've liked to have known. Sooner.

The next fall, when my mother was visiting me in California, with the veil lifted from our family tree, she told me this story:

She had happened to be watching the E! True Hollywood Story about the movie Dirty Dancing a few days before. The main interviewee was a woman named Eleanor, who'd written and produced the movie, telling the story of how she made it happen, how the coming-of-age tale of a Jewish teen in the Catskills was such a personal story for her. As she talked about her childhood, some old pictures of her family were shown, including one of her mother and father.

My mother, watching this, recognized the picture. She had the same one in her own album. It was her aunt and uncle. She realized the woman being interviewed was her long-lost first cousin Eleanor.

I was so excited to hear this. I'd never had a relative in show business before! My mom figured I would find this interesting, and that would be it. But that was not at all it.

When I returned to my office, I immediately looked up Eleanor in the Writers Guild Directory. She was listed there, repped by someone at CAA. I wrote her a letter, saying that I was the granddaughter of Harry, her uncle, and that my mother was her first cousin, and had recently seen her Dirty Dancing documentary, and that I was working as a writer myself, and was very proud to know that there was such a successful writer in my family. I sent the letter to her in care of her agent.

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