It’s Christmas here in Beverly Hills. The nearby shopping street of shopping streets, Rodeo Drive, is lit and decorated beyond anything I have ever seen before. One blazing store front after another with the most expensive names in modern shopping history. It’s a carnival of the vanities. It’s a place I would not have believed existed — but exists.
We pray that God allowed the miracle of America to triumph in the atomic age.
At my usual lunch time cafe, the Cabana Café of the Beverly Hills Hotel, there are beautiful girls and handsome men galore. They are wearing the clothing of rich people. I am there in my “uniform” of blue blazer and oxford cloth shirt and school ties from days in New York and New Haven. My usual hostesses greet me with smiles and laughter.
As always, I say “Merry Christmas!” to everyone I pass in the lobby. Some ask me why I, a Jew with Jewish forebears from the days of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, wish everyone “Merry Christmas,” instead of “Happy Holidays.”
It’s not complicated. To me, “Merry Christmas” means, “Be thankful for God’s love.” Despite the horrors that man has rained down on man, be thankful that we are still here, having a good meal, walking down well-decorated halls, exchanging greetings with men and women we barely know — except that we know them as beneficiaries of God’s love.
Yes, we Jews know the men and women in Beverly Hills have been blessed beyond imagination by surviving the Holocaust, by having ancestors who fought against men who killed everyone they could find just out of hate.
Every night, my goddess wife and I hug each other and say intense prayers of thanks for my wife’s war hero father, Col. Dale Denman Jr., who fought to liberate Gunskirchen Lager, a horrible death camp. He was a “warrior angel.” So was her uncle, Major Bob Denman, both of Prescott, Arkansas, who fought in the gruesome battle of the Chosin Reservoir. We pray for my father, Lt. J.G., USN, Herbert Stein, who sailed on two aircraft carriers that were sunk off the island of Luzon, and miraculously survived.
We pray for Richard Nixon, who saved Israel when the USSR wanted to destroy it.
We pray that God allowed the miracle of America to triumph in the atomic age.
We pray with thanks that God allowed me to have the world’s most glorious woman, my wife, Alexandra Denman, to survive and lie next to me for most of a century. And we will keep on praying, and saying, “Merry Christmas!!!” And God bless America!!!
READ MORE from Ben Stein:
