Like many Jewish families, the Wolfsons take Christmas extremely seriously. Latkes and smoked salmon are served before homemade cranberry sauce and brussels sprouts. My dad’s hand-painted menorah, which he made during the ceramics cafe boom of the early 2000s, sits proudly underneath the Christmas tree.
As such, I had never missed a Christmas with the family – although there had been some near misses. In 2019, we spent Christmas by my dad’s hospital bed after his stroke – us sipping on hospital canteen gingerbread lattes, him having Christmas dinner in the guise of vanilla-scented protein, fed through a tube. In 2020, I saw my family only from six feet away, double-masked and on the doorstep. I delivered presents, but they were not opened for a few days, to let any stray virus dissipate.
But in October 2021, I had moved to New York to escape a breakup for the ages and another dark British winter spent maintaining unsocial distance. In New York, there had been no second or third lockdowns; while you had to flash a vaccine card before entering a bar, once inside there was a we’re-all-gonna-die-anyway attitude to infection that was more in line with my mental state at the time.
In New York, it felt like the weight of Covid was lifted. I made random friends late at night in bars and even followed up with them the next day; a freshers’ week in my 30s.
When Christmas rolled around, my parents, who were living in a very different pandemic reality, said it was better not to come. So I made alternative plans: I would go upstate with the family of friends from London. Then, at 11am on Christmas morning, I got a text saying an aunt had Covid. The whole thing was off.
Alone on Christmas morning and trying to form a last-minute plan, I turned to my new party friends and texted a 24-year-old production assistant called Caitlin, whom I had met at the afterparty of a gig a few weeks earlier. I had mistaken her for a friend of the band, when in fact she was a fan trying to sneak in. The morning after we met, I awoke hungover to find she had invited me and her friend Alexa to the Met. Soon after, she was taking me to warehouse parties I would never have known about and the three of us were in a WhatsApp group called Sexy Winter.
“You’re welcome to come hang with my family for Korean Christmas!” came her immediate reply.
And so I found myself in an Upper East Side apartment with Caitlin’s mum, her father – who, like mine, had survived a stroke a few years earlier – her aunt and grandma, eating huge plates of cold noodle salad and vegetable pancakes. After dinner, they taught me the Korean card game hwatu and I attempted to show them a bit of poker. Whatever we played involved gambling and I lost every time.
What started as a festive flop turned out to be the most charming of Christmases, drinking heavily and reminiscing about people I had never met. I couldn’t bring myself to explain to Caitlin’s grandma that we had met blind drunk just a few weeks earlier, but I think everyone sensed that we were new friends.
I would love to say that it was the start of a beautiful tradition and I have been back every year, but, just like after a real freshers’ week, we drifted apart in the subsequent years. But I am eternally grateful to the Kims for saving Christmas 2021. Should they ever find themselves in London, they are welcome to light the candles on the ceramic menorah.
