1
She just needed one more.
Rachel Rubenstein-Goldblatt stared at the collection of miniature Christmas figurines spread across her desk. She owned 236 of the smiling porcelain Santas from the world-famous Holiday Dreams Collection. When her best friend, Mickey, arrived, she would complete that collection with the addition of the coveted Margaritaville Santa.
Oh, the Margaritaville Santa. How she had dreamed of the day when that tiny porcelain Santa, in a Hawaiian shirt and wearing Ray-Ban sunglasses, would sit atop her prized collection.
Rachel had scoured eBay for the tiny limited-edition figurine, set up price alerts and left frantic (somewhat drunken) posts at three in the morning on collector blogs. Now, after six years, five months and seven days of hunting, the Margaritaville Santa would finally be hers.
The anxiety was killing her.
Rachel glanced out the window of her apartment. It was snowing outside. Gentle flakes fell down onto Broadway and made New York City feel magical. She was wondering when Mickey would actually get here when there was a knock at the door.
“Finally!” Rachel said. Excitement bubbled up inside her as she raced to the front door, throwing it open. And then, disappointment. Her mother stood in the threshold.
“I was in the neighborhood,” she said, a perfectly innocent smile spread across her two round cheeks.
Her mother was always in the neighborhood.
It was one of the downsides of living on the Upper West Side while her mother, a top New York fertility specialist, worked out of Columbia Hospital just ten blocks away.
Rachel had to think quickly. She loved her mother, and was even willing to entertain her completely intrusive and unannounced visits, but the door to her home office was still open.
“Mickey’s about to stop by,” Rachel warned.
“I won’t be but a minute,” her mother said, lifting up a plastic bag from Ruby’s Smoked Fish Shop as a peace offering. “I brought you some dinner.”
Dr. Rubenstein pushed her way inside, letting her fingers graze the mezuzah on Rachel’s doorpost before entering. Making her way straight to the refrigerator, she began unloading “dinner.”
There was a large vat of chopped liver, two loaves of pumpernickel bread, three different types of rugalach. Dr. Rubenstein believed in feeding the people you love, and the love she had for her daughter was likely to end in heart disease.
“How are you feeling?” her mother inquired.
“Fine,” Rachel said, using the opportunity to close her office door.
Dr. Rubenstein looked up from the refrigerator. Her eyes rolled from Rachel’s hair, matted and clumped, down to her wrinkled pink pajamas.
She frowned. “You look pale.”
“I am pale,” Rachel reminded her.
“Rachel,” her mother said pointedly, “you need to take your myalgic encephalomyelitis seriously.”
Rachel rolled her eyes. Outside, the gentle snow was gathering into a full-blown storm.
Dr. Rubenstein was probably one of the few people who called Rachel’s disease by its medical term, the name research scientists and experts preferred, describing the complex multisystem disease that affected her neurological, immune, autonomic and metabolic systems. Most everyone else in the world knew it by the simple and distasteful moniker chronic fatigue syndrome.
Which was, quite possibly, the most trivializing name for a disease in the entire world. The equivalent of calling Alzheimer’s “Senior Moment Syndrome.”
It did not begin to remotely describe the crushing fatigue, migraines, brain fog or weirdo pains that Rachel lived with daily. It certainly did not describe the 25 percent of patients who found themselves bed-bound or homebound—existing on feeding tubes, unable to leave dark rooms for years—or the 75 percent of patients who could no longer work full-time.
For now, however, Rachel
was one of the lucky ones. She had managed to graduate college with a degree in creative writing and, over the last decade, build a career working from home.
“Ema,” Rachel said, growing frustrated. “My body, my choice.”
“But—”
“Change the topic.”
Dr. Rubenstein pressed her lips together and swallowed the words on her tongue. It was not an easy feat for the woman. “And how’s work?”
“Good.” Rachel shrugged, returning to the couch. “Nothing that interesting to report.”
“And the freelance work you’re doing—” her mother craned her neck to peep around her apartment “—it’s keeping you busy?”
“Busy enough.”
Dr. Rubenstein raised one eyebrow in her daughter’s direction.
Rachel knew what her mother was really asking. How can you afford a two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side simply by doing freelance editorial work? But Dr. Rubenstein had learned an important halachic lesson from her husband, Rabbi Aaron Goldblatt, early on in their marriage; you don’t ask questions you don’t really want the answers to.
For all Rachel knew, her mother believed her to be a webcam girl. Or a high-class prostitute. Or the mistress of some dashingly handsome Arabian prince. All of which, Rachel was certain, would be preferable to what she actually did for a living.
“Ema,” Rachel said, steering the conversation away from her career. “What is it you’re really here for?”
“Why do you always think I have an ulterior motive, Rachel?”
“Because I know you.”
“All right!” Dr. Rubenstein threw her hands up into the air. “You caught me. I do have an ulterior motive.”
“Baruch Hashem.”
“Now, it’s nothing bad, I promise,” her mother said, taking a seat on her couch. “I simply wanted to see if you were available for Shabbat dinner this Friday.”
There it was. The real reason for her mother’s visit. Shabbat at Rabbi Goldblatt’s house was not just a weekly religious occurrence, it was a chance for Dr. Rubenstein to kidnap her daughter for twenty-five hours straight and force her to meet single Jewish men.
Over the years, there had been all sorts of horrible setups. There was the luxury auto dealer who used his sleeve as a napkin during dinner. The rabbinical student who spent an entire Saturday afternoon debating aloud with only her father over what to do when an unkosher meatball falls into a pot of kosher meatballs.
And then, there was her favorite blind date setup of them all. Dovi, the Israeli mountain climber, who had traveled the world in his perfectly healthy and functioning body, before telling Rachel that he didn’t think chronic fatigue syndrome was a real disease.
Chas v’chalilah.
Rachel had no intention of spending another Friday night, and Saturday afternoon, entertaining her mother’s idea of a dreamboat. Especially not when that dreamboat had the word Titanic embroidered across
the bottom of their knitted kippah.
“No,” Rachel said.
“Rachel!” her mother pleaded. “Just hear me out.”
“I’m too busy, Ema.”
“But you haven’t been home in ages!”
“You live on Long Island,” Rachel shot back. “I see you and Daddy all the time.”
Her mother could not argue with this factoid.
“Jacob Greenberg will be coming,” her mother finally said.
Rachel nearly choked on her tongue. “What?”
“You remember Jacob Greenberg?”
The question sounded so innocent on the surface. Jacob Greenberg. How could Rachel forget the name? The duo had spent one summer together at Camp Ahava in the Berkshires before the seventh grade.
“Jacob Greenberg?” Rachel spit back. “The psychopath who spent an entire summer pulling my hair and pushing me into the lake?”
“I recall you two getting along quite well at one point.”
“He set me up in front of everyone, Mom. He turned my first kiss into a giant Camp Ahava prank!”
“He was twelve!” Dr. Rubenstein was on her feet now. “Twelve, Rachel. You can’t hold a grown man accountable for something he did as a child. For heaven’s sake... The boy hadn’t even had his bar mitzvah.”
Rachel could feel the red rising in her cheeks. A wellspring of complicated emotions rose up inside her. Hate and love. Confusion and excitement. Just hearing his name again after all these years brought Rachel smack-dab back to her adolescence. And sitting there beside all those terrible memories of him humiliating her were the good ones. Rachel couldn’t help herself. She drifted back to that summer.
The way it felt to hold his hand in secret. The realization that there was more to their relationship than just dumb pranks and dead bugs left in siddurs. Jacob had gotten Rachel to open up. She had trusted him. Showed him a side of herself reserved for a select few. Aside from Mickey, she had never been so honest with anybody in her entire life.
Dr. Rubenstein dismissed her daughter’s concerns with a small wave of the hand. “It was eighteen years ago. Don’t you think you’re being a tad ridiculous?”
“Me?” Rachel scoffed. “You’re the one who’s hosting my summer camp archenemy for Shabbat.”
“He’s in town from Paris for some big event he’s throwing. What would you have me do—not invite him?”
“While you’re at it, don’t forget to invite Dana Shoshanski. She made me cry every day in third grade. In fact, let me get you a list of all the people who made fun of me for being Rachel Rubenstein-Goldblatt growing
up. I want to make sure you don’t miss anybody.”
Her mother did not blink. “I’m sorry it was hard for you...being our daughter.”
Just like that, her mother had twisted all those feelings back around on her.
Rachel bit back her words, looking up to the ceiling. She loved her parents more than anything in the world. They had been there for her at every stage of her life, doting and wonderful. Still, the Rubenstein-Goldblatt name came with pressures. They were pressures that, even as an adult, still managed to follow her.
A knock at the door drew their attention away.
“Let me get that for you,” Dr. Rubenstein said sweetly, rising from the couch.
“Ho, ho, ho-oooooooh...” Mickey said, standing at the door, his smile fading into panic. He was holding a medium-sized red gift bag in the air. He glanced at Rachel, who signaled the immediate danger by running one finger across her throat. Quickly Mickey hid the bag behind his back.
“Dr. Rubenstein!” he said, his eyes wide. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”
“Not to worry, Mickey,” Dr. Rubenstein said, adjusting her scarf. “I was just getting ready to leave.” She turned back to her daughter one last time. “Just think about coming to dinner, okay? Daddy and I won’t be around forever, and there may come a time in your life when you miss spending Shabbat at your parents’ house.”
Mickey waited for the door to shut firmly behind him and the elevator at the end of the hall to ding before turning to his best friend. “Whoa,” he said. “That woman is a pro when it comes to Jewish guilt.”
“Tell me about it,” Rachel said, collapsing on the couch.
“So what did our fine rebbetzin want this evening?” Mickey asked, taking his boots and jacket off at the front door.
“You’ll never believe it if I tell you.”
To everyone that knew them, it seemed that Mickey and Rachel had been bashert, soul mates, since time immemorial, having met at Camp Ahava when they were eight years old.
Since Rachel couldn’t be sure what drew the pair together, she assumed it had something to do with how other people at their camp had treated them. Mikael, the adopted son of a powerhouse lesbian couple from Manhattan, was Black. And Rachel, as everyone who met her cared to remind her, was the daughter of Rabbi Aaron Goldblatt. The Rabbi Aaron Goldblatt.
Whether they liked it or not, when Mickey and Rachel walked into a room, people noticed them. People watched them. This shared experience formed the basis of their comradery and, later, extended far beyond Jewish summer camp.
“She wanted to set me up with Jacob Greenberg,” Rachel said.
Mickey finished pulling off his boots. “Jacob Greenberg? From Camp Ahava?”
“The one and only.”
“Wow,” Mickey said, coming over to sit beside Rachel. “That’s a name I haven’t heard in forever. Didn’t he give you mono?”
Rachel squeezed her eyes shut. She did not want to think about that first kiss with Jacob Greenberg. “Can we seriously not talk about this right now? I’ve waited seven long years for this moment, Mickey...and just like some of the other most important moments of my life,
Jacob Greenberg is ruining it.”
“You’re right,” Mickey said, laying the red bag on the coffee table between them. “And I have just the thing to take your mind off He Who Shall Not Be Named.”
This was it. The moment she had waited for. With eager fingers, Rachel reached into the bag, pulled out the tiny figurine and gently removed the plastic bubble wrapping that protected it.
It was even better than she had imagined.
Santa smiled back at her from atop a surfboard. His blue-and-white Hawaiian shirt sat partly unbuttoned while, in his right hand, he nursed a fruity drink decorated with a tiny green umbrella. It was that umbrella, in mint condition, that made the Margaritaville Santa so valuable.
“It’s perfect,” Rachel whispered.
Mickey shook his head. “You are a sick, sick woman.”
“Let’s put him with the rest!”
The two rushed, giggling and screaming, back to her office. Mickey threw open the door—he was the only person in the world who had ever seen inside—and gasped at the sight laid out before him. For it was mid-December, nearly Christmas, and Rachel Rubenstein-Goldblatt had clearly lost her damn mind.
“Girrrrrl,” Mickey said, placing his hand on his heart. “Did you straight up rob a Christmas store?”
“I might have gone a little overboard this year.”
“Ya think?”
Garlands draped across the ceiling and desk hutch. A silver tinsel tree, flickering with lights, nearly overtook a desktop computer. But perhaps most impressive of all was the tiny red-and-green choo-choo train, set up to circle the room, every hour, on the dot.
The place was filled to the brim with Christmas cheer. One could barely make out the rows of shelves just behind the decorations, which held an impressive array of Christmas-inspired romance novels. Or the posters above them—four now in total—advertising made-for-TV Christmas movies.
Rachel placed her coveted Margaritaville Santa in front of the work of fiction it had inspired. On the movie poster above her, a couple kissed as a sun set on a dreamy beach behind them. Santa, clad in a blue-and-white Hawaiian shirt and Ray-Ban sunglasses, smiled knowingly from a lifeguard chair.
“‘Christmas in the Caribbean,’” Mickey read the words aloud. “‘By bestselling author Margot Cross.’”
Margot Cross. Rachel had found the pen name rather clever when the idea was first suggested by her agent. But now, after nearly a decade, she found the moniker stifling. Margot Cross was like a bad Shabbat guest who had come invited and overstayed their welcome.
“Are you judging me?” Rachel asked.
“I’m not judging you,” Mickey said, exasperated.
“Because you sound very judgy.”
“Fine,” Mickey admitted. “I’m judging you a little. But seriously, Rachel. You’re the bestselling author of over twenty Christmas romance novels! You have four Christmas movies on television. And nobody in the world even knows about it. Not your readers, not your fans,
not your parents! I mean, I’m all for keeping folks in the dark about one’s personal life, but don’t you think it’s time to come out of the Christmas closet? Or in your case...the Christmas office?”
Silence permeated the room.
Rachel wanted to tell people the truth about what she did for a living, but coming out wasn’t that easy. She couldn’t just stand up on the bima, like Mickey had done at his bar mitzvah all those years prior, and tell everyone the truth.
“Fifth grade,” Rachel finally said, aloud.
“What about fifth grade?”
“My mother caught me putting up a construction paper Christmas tree in my room. Do you know what she did, Mickey? Do you know how my sweet and loving ema responded to the sight of a green construction paper tree taped up to the wall? She tore the whole thing down. Ripped it to shreds. Pointed her finger in my face and said, ‘We do not celebrate Christmas in this house.’ Just like that. No debate. No questions. What do you think my mother will do when she finds out I’m really Margot Cross, bestselling author of over twenty Christmas romances?”
Mickey considered her story. “That was twenty years ago, Rachel. You were just a little kid. Even my mothers would stomp into my public school every once in a while, and demand to know why we were singing ‘O Holy Night.’ Now, they couldn’t care less what I’m singing. Things change.”
“Things change for you,” Rachel reminded him. “My father is still Rabbi Aaron Goldblatt.”
Mickey grimaced. Even he couldn’t find a bright side to that argument.
Rabbi Goldblatt wasn’t some no-name low-level rabbi. He was a macher, a bigwig, in her community.
He served a synagogue of twelve hundred families on Long Island. He had written six books on Jewish law and frequently spoke on the synagogue lecture circuit. He was known for his brilliant teshuvot, Jewish legal responsa to questions, and set Jewish legal precedent for millions of Jews worldwide. Even beyond all these things, her name came with a legacy.
Her great-great-great grandfather, the honorable Rabbi Pinchas Goldblatt, had been a noted scholar back in Poland. Her great-uncle, famed philosopher Elliot Rubenstein, had helped establish a Jewish seminary in New York. Her great-great-grandmother, Eliza Goldblatt, worked alongside Mordechai Kaplan to create the first JCCs, or Jewish Community Centers. Even her older brother had followed in the family tradition, becoming a rabbi himself, taking a major pulpit out in Los Angeles after ordination.
Meanwhile, Rachel—sick and disabled, unmarried and childless—had leaned in fully to her betrayal. She had taken her secret, shameful love of Christmas and turned it into a successful career.
“I don’t know,” Mickey
said, throwing his arms into the air. “You’re nearly thirty years old. You’re a full-fledged and independent adult. What are you gonna do? Hide who you are forever because it might blow back on your father, or destroy some ridiculous family legacy?”
“I’ve considered it.”
“You deserve better than that, Rachel.”
Rachel nodded. The problem was...so did her parents.
Congregants expected their rabbi to be beyond reproach. A person whose dedication to Jewish law and living moved them beyond human frailties. It was a pressure, unfortunately, that often extended out to the families. Rabbis—like their partners and their children—learned very quickly not to share vulnerabilities.
Rachel could still remember the way her mother warned her before every Shabbat and holiday service to be on her best behavior. Don’t fight with your brother. Don’t fidget in the pews. Remember that people are watching.
Eventually, Rachel internalized the message. She became constantly aware of what she said and how she presented herself to others. She stopped whispering secrets to friends. She stopped having fun. She never once, in her entire life, forgot the lesson handed down from her mother. People were watching. Your choices, and your actions, could affect the entire family.
Now Rachel spent far too much time envisioning the worst that could happen. Her father would lose his contract at his beloved synagogue and no longer be allowed to be an arbitrator of Jewish law. Her mother, who lived for hosting guests on Shabbat, would suddenly find herself shunned by their tight-knit Jewish community. Perhaps her parents would even go so far as to consider her dead. Tear their clothing in fits of grief before sitting shiva for her.
It had happened before. In the past. To other rebellious Jewish children.
The worst part of all, Rachel was certain, would be seeing the look of disappointment on her parents’ faces. She loved them so much. She couldn’t bear the thought of hurting them. She wanted to be a perfect daughter—a nice Jewish girl. Someone her family could kvell about and be proud of.
Suddenly, the room sprang to life. A thousand twinkling lights exploded around them, as an animatronic Santa sashayed back and forth. The train chug-chug-chugged around its track, dipping in and out of the tiny Christmas village displayed on floating shelves above her head, playing a happy mechanical tune. Mickey jumped at the sound, nearly knocking over one of her tiny Christmas trees, loaded down in cat ornaments, in the process.
He clutched his heart. “Jesus.”
“Sorry,” she said, pulling out the chair from her desk. “I have it set to go off every hour.”
Standing upon it, she searched for the small power button located behind a row of Christmas garlands, shutting down the epic display. The music moaned to a standstill, the lights in her office returned to normal, and the train, the one she had so lovingly and painstakingly set up around her office, came to a stop right next to a writing award for Margot Cross.
“Every hour? How the hell do you sleep?”
“I can’t hear it in my bedroom.”
Rachel stepped down from the chair. She knew it was odd—the way she hoarded Christmas
trinkets inside her secret office—but she found it comforting. She loved everything about Christmas. The music. The throw pillows. The decor. It brought her to this place of unapologetic joy, where nothing bad ever happened and everyone found their happy ending.
“I just love it so much. I can’t help myself, Mickey. I’ve tried to quit a dozen times, write something else, find some other story filled with the same level of magic...but I always wind up going right back to Christmas.”
“It’s Christmas, Rachel. Not a drug addiction.”
“It feels like a drug addiction.”
“You know what your problem is?” Mickey snapped his fingers. “You’ve never experienced a real Christmas.”
Rachel sighed dramatically. “I know.”
While both of Mickey’s mothers identified as Jewish, Sheryl, who Mickey referred to as Mom, had been raised Southern Baptist. But after Sheryl met Elana, Mickey’s ema, during a drunken midnight run for munchies in the East Village, the duo—both law students—quickly realized they were heading toward a permanent partnership. Children came later, along with the decision by both women to build a home centered around Jewish values.
Mickey was Jewish. He lived with both feet as firmly in the Jewish community as Rachel. But unlike Rachel—whose family tree had not been shaken up once since the shtetls of Bialystock—Mickey had non-Jewish family. He had non-Jewish grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles. And growing up together, when the winter holiday break came, Mickey often went to see them.
It used to make Rachel all types of jelly.
“I’m serious, Rachel,” Mickey continued, rolling his eyes a little in her direction. “Your entire frame of reference for the holiday comes from Hallmark movies and aisle sixteen at Target. It’s not real. Come to my aunt Vivian’s house for the holidays. Watch Uncle Joe get drunk and say offensive things to my mothers. Trust me, you won’t think it’s so magical then.”
Rachel fell into silence. Maybe Mickey was right. Maybe her entire life, wrapped up in red-and-green Christmas ribbon, was just another fiction. She was used to them, after all. She had been doling them out her whole life. But her best friend since forever was forgetting one thing.
“I don’t want it to be real,” Rachel said quietly.
Mickey blinked. “Rachel—”
“It’s okay.” She forced a smile, downplaying her sadness. She didn’t talk about it much, but chronic illness, like her career writing Christmas romances, were two events that had developed together.
“No.” Mickey took her hand. “I get it, okay? I didn’t mean to stomp all over your Christmas safe-space. You’re amazing, all right? This room is amazing! I totally get why you love Christmas.”
“You do?”
“Yeah.” Mickey smiled. “I mean...what do us super-Jewy types really get anyway? Apples and honey on Rosh Hashanah? Twenty-five hours of fasting on Yom Kippur? Sleeping outside in a cold-ass, roofless hut in the middle of October?”
Rachel laughed. “You’ve always hated Sukkot.”
“With a passion! And don’t even get me started on Hanukkah.”
“Ugh,” Rachel groaned. “Hanukkah.”
“Frozen latkes, crappy dreidel games—”
“Plus, you always burn your fingers on the menorah.”
“That holiday is a giant fire hazard,” Mickey said, punctuating his next set of words with full snark. “Honestly, it’s amazing half of New York doesn’t burn down every Kislev.”
Rachel warmed like a cup of hot cocoa on a cold winter day. It was just like Mickey to say the right thing, pulling her out of any sadness. He was one of a kind, truly. She would never take his love or devotion for granted. ...
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