{"id":14317,"date":"2009-12-15T15:39:58","date_gmt":"2009-12-15T23:39:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=14317"},"modified":"2009-12-15T15:39:58","modified_gmt":"2009-12-15T23:39:58","slug":"missing-christmas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=14317","title":{"rendered":"Missing Christmas"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s a very personal autobiographical detail,&#8221; said Dennis Prager on his radio show Dec. 15, 2009, &#8220;but it really shook me up and began my oddysey toward who I am today. I was 20 years old when I went for my junior year to England. During the Christmas break, which was about three weeks, like most students in England, I left England for warmer weather. I crossed the English channel, took a train down the western part of Europe, then to the bottom of Spain and then took a boat to Morocco. This was on my own. This was a very adventurous trip. I was in Morocco for Christmas that year. To my amazement, because I monitor my own emotions a great deal. I have a lot of feedback. I&#8217;m very fortunate in that way. I realized what&#8217;s troubling me. I&#8217;m missing something. To my amazement, I didn&#8217;t immediately realize it, but I was missing the Christmas season. It was not Morocco&#8217;s fault. It&#8217;s a Muslim country.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I couldn&#8217;t believe how I missed it.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I was two years away from immersion in Jewish education. Of course I never had it, but it permeated my life. My parents, both Orthodox Jews, would watch the Christmas mass from Rome every Christmas eve. I loved it. My father, I and the Pope were all wearing yarmulkes.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s a very personal autobiographical detail,&#8221; said Dennis Prager on his radio show Dec. 15, 2009, &#8220;but it really shook me up and began my oddysey toward who I am today. I was 20 years old when I went for &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=14317\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[20437,20436,20435,29761,17623,1085],"class_list":["post-14317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dennis-prager","tag-adventurous-trip","tag-christmas-eve","tag-christmas-mass","tag-dennis-prager","tag-muslim-country","tag-orthodox-jews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14317"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14317\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}