Today is Christmas and I am Jewish. As popular legend has it, Jews are supposed to eat Chinese food on Christmas. Had my sister not married a Christian with a Christmas tree, and started throwing an annual Christmas get-together at her house in the suburbs, I might be digging my chopsticks into moo shu myself.

Which brings me to one of my fondest Christmas memories: The Big OnionChristmas Day Tour of the Jewish Lower East Side. Now in it’s 17th year, this tour has become a Christmas Day tradition. I decided one Christmas Day, with no other plans, to join this tour, which was in its second year. I read about it in Time Out NY and figured “why not”, and thought it might be nice to hit Chinatown afterward.

So I stood at the meeting spot of the tour,with about 300 other people on the corner of Delancey and Essex, in front of the Olympic Diner, which probably ran out of coffee. Evidently, the tour had only attracted a crowd of one-tenth this size the year before. But word of mouth and the mention in TONY had brought a crowd which exceeded all expectations. Our three or four tour guides explained to the mob that, with one guide for every 15 people, they needed to rouse out of bed, about twenty more Columbia University graduate history students to accommodate the throng that showed up.

It was a freezing day and we must have been an interesting sight. By now, the crowd had spread out all over that south side of Delancy from Essex all the way to Christie. Suddenly, a van of people which had just come over the Williamsburg Bridge, stopped to look at the “huddled mass”. One of the passengers stuck his head out the van window and asked what was going on. One of the women yelled back “WE’RE A BUNCH OF JEWS WITH NOTHING TO DO FOR CHRISTMAS!”