On a Quest for New Traditions
It is Christmas Eve Day in 2007 and I’m sitting at the counter of Don’s Pizza King in Belmar. Mitchel and I drove from Brooklyn as I’d vowed last year that I would not stay in New York City for next Christmas. I was feeling alienated by the overarching gloss of Christmas. We take to the Jersey Shore on this wintry day driving in my trusty old gray Buick Skylark.
Last Christmas Eve, I ambled through Park Slope passing brownstone after brownstone with twinkling lights in rainbows of color, live green Christmas trees in the large windows, increasingly gentrified, yet so pretty, pristine, and perfect. I’d enjoyed traditional Christmases for many years but had been scrambling to navigate the holiday, reflecting on what it means for me – now as an adult, family far away or no longer alive. My parents had died ten years ago. After their deaths, my sister and I would spend Christmas with our dear aunt Sophie, but she too has recently died. As I walked block by block past the superficial perfection, it was so picturesque, I couldn’t help but cry. I promised myself at that moment that I would create new traditions. I wasn’t sure what they would look like but I wanted something meaningful.
Over the Verazzano Bridge, traveling down the Garden State Parkway, I stop along Belmar’s Main Street. Belmar wasn’t our intended destination; we were staying in Red Bank and we’d hoped for Asbury Park a bit further north, the place to which I had (from days of yore) the greatest connection, but, alas, everything was closed, so we kept driving.
As I drive, I notice they are trying to spruce up Belmar, a concept that seems almost sacrilegious. Don’s, where we end up, part restaurant, part counter pizzeria, boasts that it has been in this same location for 40 years. It fronts the original décor, a bit worn down, the tables sporting red and white checkerboard tablecloths, charming nonetheless. In New York City, our neighborhood treasures too often end up displaced or destroyed, pasted over with the shiny, the new, the expensive, the bland.

Belmar has always been rough around the edges. In the summer, it is considered a “college” town, albeit without any college. I’d lived there for two summers when I was in college. One year, I lived with 23 roommates in a large but modest house on a quiet street five blocks from the ocean. The most notable thing about it was its broken front door. Oh, and that while I was living there, my friend and housemate, Jennie, dated Bruce Springsteen. For 3 years.
Bruce Springsteen came to the house one day while I was there and no one came and told me! I was in my room upstairs reading having no idea those housemates who were around that afternoon were meeting him on the ground floor. At the time, I wrote and published a newsletter/fanzine, The Aurora, about him. I’d met him previously on the Asbury Park Boardwalk and I’d run into him at the Monmouth Mall but still. (I can hear this in my 21 year old voice.) I’d seen many shows where he turned up to play with local bands in Asbury and nearby spots. (He was the catalyst for my later going into the music business.)
To enter the house, funny enough, you had to crouch down and fit yourself through the bottom half of the door. When my parents came to visit from Northern New Jersey, I was excited to show them the house, and, perhaps, more importantly, my independence. I thought nothing of the broken front door. They were horrified and wanted me to leave immediately. (There was no way that was going to happen.)
The following year, I lived in town with three roommates in a rooming house above a bar called George’s on 13th Street, half a block from the ocean. My roommates were there on the weekends. I was there all week and worked at a Sears department store in a local mall. My friend Regina would come from Long Island and we would dash off to see bands along the Shore or drive south to Philadelphia. (I had a white Firebird which I called Rosalita. I know, such a Jersey girl!) George ran the bar and his mother ran the boarding part. His mom would go out each morning at 6 a.m. for a swim in the ocean and leave coffee and donuts for us in the entryway at the bottom of the stairs.
Now, we’re here. We drive along the quiet beach town streets. I want to show Mitchel these two former abodes but I can’t find the broken door house, and George’s entire block has been torn down, sacrificed to the developer gods. Having run out of funds to rebuild, it’s now just dirt and debris, a sad casualty of the “booming” economy.
At Don’s counter, I pick up The Asbury Park Press. The cover story is about a man named Steve Brigham who quit his job so he’d have time to help the homeless in the area. It gets my attention, this story is amazing. I say to Mitchel, “This guy brings food, blankets, propane for heaters to these people who live on the outskirts of town in the woods. A homeless man directed him to the location where other homeless people live. He doesn’t have any stipulations for helping or ask anything of them. He travels there in a makeshift bus.” I am very touched. Perhaps because it’s Christmas Eve, perhaps the story itself gives me hope: so happy that an individual like Steve Brigham exists.
Mitchel is interested in the song playing on the jukebox. “I wonder who’s singing this,” he says. I wonder too. He asks the waitress and she tells us that it is The Romantics. Neither of us thinks this is correct – it’s too political, too pensive, too guitar-driven, melodic and quiet. But maybe it was.
I reflect on the story of Steve Brigham. Why does it seem that people who don’t have much are usually the ones who put themselves on the line to help? In New York City, the corporations and developers have extreme power and any notion of helping out the ‘little guy’ got largely squashed many years ago. If you suggest something else could exist, people mostly laugh or scoff. It is Max Weber’s seminal book “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” without any ethics, just that capitalist (lack of) “spirit.”

I had decided to venture down the shore for this Christmas due to the absence of previous traditions. I felt the need for a connection to something, something missing that I recall from long ago. I didn’t need someone to bring me propane but it’s as if I was living in the woods and no one knew I needed a blanket. Or maybe no one knew I was in the woods. The problem, I realized is, what I needed, even I didn’t know.
I have amazing memories of traditional Christmases with family – year after year of those memories. Yet, I appreciate the opportunity to figure out a new path, to understand that the path is not always crystal clear, and might at times feel sad; it can go in many different directions year to year and that is okay.
That day, down the Jersey shore, an hour south of where I grew up, the pensive feeling on the boardwalk, the salt in the air, the grittiness, the beauty and strength of the ocean, the memories of my old haunts and experiences, instill a feeling of possibility. This is where I go when I want to feel connection. My endeavor works to create a new tradition, even if just for this year, one that has meaning – for me.
Mitchel and I stumble a bit because we hadn’t planned our Christmas Eve dinner. Now, more places are open on Christmas Eve – it was not the case those years ago. As we attempt to book a dinner reservation, everything is sold out. I figured everyone would be in their homes, with their Christmas trees swathed in bright lights, red and green garland, cooking elaborate meals for their picturesque (ha!) extensive families. In my romanticism for the old days, I didn’t realize that the holiday would change and people now would be eating out and filling up restaurants. So much for family Christmas dinner. We find the one place not booked where literally no one is: our hotel’s restaurant. And although Christmas Eve ends up feeling a bit isolated, even that has its own eerie charm. We created a new way of celebrating and it worked just fine. For that moment, it felt lit up like all those glittery Park Slope trees. It wasn’t pristine or perfect but it was illuminated. I figured out how to drape the lights and where to find an outlet. Or maybe you could say I found the propane.
Don’s Pizza King closed in 2021, a decision made by the proprietor and at least not due to exorbitant rent hikes.