My New Jewish Husband

So I went to Barnes & Noble in Burlington tonight single and came home married to a nice Jewish man. Well ... not really.

See I got my kid a CD for Christmas and then I saw these two ladies at this "FREE GIFT WRAPPING" table in the corner and I thought it would be a very good idea to get the thing wrapped since I hate wrapping stuff. My son wasn't with me so I had a prayer of him actually getting a surprise if I brought it home covered up. I also liked the free part of the gift wrapping, but I wasn't quite noticing a key fact.

All the Christmas wrapping paper was BLUE.

So then, they took my kid's CD and started picking the price stickers off -- this is a real service, I stink at picking off stickers -- and then they are wrapping it in this blue paper and I'm just this Christian girl that doesn't pick up on things so fast sometimes.

So they asked me about my kid and if he liked celebrating BOTH holidays and I still wasn't getting it ... but then ... oh yeah, blue paper ... oh yeah ... right ... I LIE, "Yeah, he loves celebrating Hanukah and Christmas."

And they're looking at me in bright pink with blonde hair, and I really do NOT look too Jewish, so they ask me, "So is your husband ... "

And now I lied once, and since I don't have a husband anyway, he might as well be Jewish, right? So now I LIE AGAIN, "Yes, right, he's Jewish. But you know how it is, he makes me do all the gift shopping for his family and mine ..."

What the hell am I saying? This on a Sunday spent feeding Christians Nilla Vanilla Wafers at church this morning as the coffee hour hostess. Anything for free gift wrapping. And I'm not wanting to start a religious or ethnic war or something. Maybe they won't give me the blue paper if they find out I'm into Jesus. Some days you just need a handy Jewish husband.

So now they are going on about how their husbands expect them to most of the shopping too. One lady points out the "DONATIONS FOR HADASSAH" lucite box on the corner of the gift wrapping table.

So it isn't even free, this free gift-wrapping?! Great. I have a new Jewish husband who makes me do all the gift buying and NO free gift wrapping and my chinese-american kid is going to get a CD with blue Hanukah paper on it, so just to kind of mix them up completely I say ...

"My kid is so into the holidays, he's been trying to talk us into celebrating Kwanzaa." Well this throws the two Hadassah ladies off, as I put a mingy $2 in their donation box. "But I put my foot down -- no Kwanzaa," I explain. They seem to think this is reasonable. I've found something we can agree on.

They hand me the wrapped CD and then I tell them I gotta go because my husband wants to go home right away. (He wants to watch those two sexy French movies I bought on DVD. He's no fool.)