Hath not a pseudo-Jew eyes?

When I was growing up, there were basically three times during the year that actually felt Jewish -- Rosh Hashannah, Yom Kippur, and Passover ... and that last one is a bit sketchy, seeing as how my family tended to skip straight to the wine-drinking, food-eating parts of the seder. Now that I've escaped the evil clutches of my semi-Christian synagogue from my youth (home of the "holy muffin"), there's really only one ocassion for which I feel Jewish: when people put up Christmas decorations.

Well, today I'm Jewish.

As I mentioned in my previous post, today has been rather slow...to the point of stopping, actually. It's 1:30 P.M. here, and I've gotten no calls so far. That's 5 hours of sitting on my ass doing nothing. On an average day, I usually get a call every 10-20 minutes. So the "social committee" of the office, led by this idiotic sack of cow pies by the name of Chris -- the same name as the aforementioned signing idiot who works with me (note to self: don't name children Chris) -- put people to work decorating the office for Christmas. No big deal, really, just cutting snow flakes out of construction paper. Chris (cow-pies, not singing-idiot) put up this little Christmas tree made out of some weird combination of pipe cleaners and something like a garden hose. Then she started putting up Christmas lights. Well, I just sat at my desk, contentedly cutting little snowflakes (not much else to do today), feeling more Jewish by the second. It's been a while since I've been in a place that didn't even make an attempt at respecting the diversity of its inhabitants -- I mean, schools pretty much have to do that nowadays, I just kind of assumed offices would be the same. So after a while, Chris (cow-pies again) came over to my desk, inspected my pile of 8 or so snowflakes, and said, "Now you're getting into the Christmas spirit!"

I couldn't help myself. Without looking up from the snowflake I was working on, I said, "Hannukah spirit."

She kind of looked at me for a second, then said, "Hannukah, Christmas, whatever. Do you want us to get a little menorah for you?"

Me: "Nah, it's not a big deal. I'm just sayin'."

Cowpies: "No, we'll do it. No problem."

Score one for the pseudo-Jew, huh? A few minutes later, she and another coworker of mine were getting ready to go out and buy some more decorations (as I said, it's hella slow today). They were discussing briefly what they were going to get. Since they were only about a foot away from me, I could overhear the conversation quite well. The tail end of it:

Cowpies: "...Oh, and we need to get a little menorah. That way we'll have all the big [holidays]."

Other: "A menorah?"

Cowpies: "Yeah, you know, for Hannukah."

(Both turn to glare at me. I just kind of grin and wave. If there was an internationally-recognized hand signal that meant "Jewboy here!", I would've done that.)

By the way, how interesting is it that Cowpies thinks that Hannukah and Christmas are all of "the big holidays"?

So now I'm the schmuck that made them spend more money on decorations. And I'll probably have some lame-ass plastic menorah sitting on my cubicle. Shoulda just kept my mouth shut.