Jill Pearlman

The holidays are so full and strange, how do you put your finger on them?  (They’re like angels, amorphous, without gender, age, bodily materiality.)   Not knowing how to celebrate – what do Santa Claus and Jesus have to do with each other? – we languish, spin longrunning sentences over tea, segue from the faux pas of old racist boss at the holiday party to best of Wicked to why a mother didn’t keep her kid from eating cake off a slip of paper on the Penn Station floor.  The thin veneer of civilization mentioned – it rubs off in uncivilized holiday travel –then we languish more, ferret out a few gray hairs among sisters, watch a tear form and magnify a gorgeous eye, then silently make its lonely trace down a soft cheek to the corner of a lip.  Wonder again about that baby Jesú.  Some of us run out to see the only positive connection, plump infants, bully infants in gold leaf on Italian medieval paintings – then come back to languish, it now obvious it is one very long sentence where the gossip keeps getting sharper, tarter – and the bonds of love more velvet.  Keep talking, lest we lose our values and become self-branded products, milk and makeup brands ourselves.  As a new world begs to be born but can’t figure out how the hell to do it.  We keep talking, we’ve read 1001 Nights; as long as we don’t use the word “broken” — the most broken word ever –we’ll be spellbound together.