Another Christmas has passed by and we are well into the New Year – it is interesting how cultural threads linger. I remember one year I was in Israel on a kibbutz. It was 1964 or 1965. The concept of a Palestinian dispossession never crossed my mind in those days. I was a war child and the holocaust loomed large and plight of the Jews from the camps was so evident. How heroic and just it all seemed, and the miracle of Jewish settlement (it was a left-wing kibbutz which really suited my idealistic view of a new and better world in those days) after such terrible times seemed such a fine thing. I was being terribly grown up and avowing that Christmas really meant nothing to me. There were terrific Hanukkah celebrations about a week before the 25^th. I remember joining in the circle of bodies and dancing the Hora and another much more complicated dance I can’t remember now in the flat area outside the hadrocle. Such energy one has in youth. I was impressed how these amazing kibbutzniks, many with numbers still on their wrists from the camps, had turned once religious celebrations into historical, cultural celebrations. That, I thought would do me instead. On the 25^th I went in the trucks early in the morning and worked in the banana plantation as usual. As I recall we started at 5 and we volunteers came back at 2 in the afternoon. The Kibbutzniks worked on until some time later. But the day felt somehow wrong; I was uneasy as I worked my way along the rows of tall banana plants, propping up the water filled stems. Was that the order? Or did we do that first and then cover the huge hands of bananas with plastic bags?  So long ago now, the details elude me. The nice end to this tale is that when I got back to the kibbutz in the afternoon, someone ran down from the office to say that an international call from Australia had come for me and that they would ring back later at a certain time. There was only one phone in the Kibbutz. Sounds weird in these days of mobile phones, when even the poorest of the poor in India have some kind of mobile access. I have no idea how my mother would have found the telephone number of a kibbutz in the Western Galilee, and international calls in those days were really exotic, pips and “Are you extending’ every three minutes, but she did. I imagine she rang 1100 (did my memory succeed there?) the old help number, and those wonderful real voices at the end of the line would always search around and find a number for you, no matter how obscure. This one must have been quite a challenge. I hadn’t seen her for two or so years, although I was a reasonably faithful daughter and wrote regularly, on the old thin blue foldable air letters, letting her know I was still surviving somewhere or other on the other side of the world. When the call finally came through I have to admit it made my day. And yes, I have been celebrating the day with various family combinations over the years ever since.