Buy a Double Four Pack for the Festival of Lighting Up!

By Michael O’Malley

While you’re buying your gifts online this holiday season, please stop by curvedpapers.com and try a festive double four pack with our three new styles, RICE, RICE KING and HEMP KING paired with Curved® Papers and our 100% organic hemp NORML® Curved Papers for less than $10.

Curved® Papers make great stocking stuffers, and favorites in holiday gift guides every year. Each purchase with coupon code Churved Chanukah makes you eligible to win one of the new Curved Papers t-shirts and a whole box of Curved Papers, like they have in the store.

I always got a kick out of Chanukah. Though I am of Irish decent, I grew up in New York, and knew a lot of ethnic kids from immigrant families like myself in my neighborhood in Brooklyn. My first encounter with Jewish people came in the form of my family’s piano teacher, Mrs. Levy. She was so beautiful and played the piano beautifully, and was a great teacher.

It was the Sixties and all kinds of radical change was going on. The Pope came to New York on Yom Kippur. My sister as born that day. My father gave her a Jewish name, Miriam. It was part of what they called the Ecumenical Movement, and Vatican II. In the Catholic Church, they had the Priest facing the congregation, and said The Mass in English and sang folk songs. It only got weirder in the Seventies.

When we moved out of Brooklyn, my best friend was a guy named Ward. Turns out he’s half Jewish. Long story.

When I went to MIT, I started school on my 18th birthday, and in the first week, I was given the assignment to make up and solve what’s called a Fermi problem, in essence, figuring something out precisely using reason rather than measuring or counting. I thought of this problem, how many of the student at MIT are Jewish? There were not that many Irish kids. I was living with a lot of Jewish kids, and I became close to them, the Italian kids, the few Black kids and the other Irish kids. The Protestant kids, I had not been around as much, and they were different. There is such a tight relationship between Boston and New York. I could think of a million reasons why there would be this number of Jewish students or that number. My answer to the problem was very accurate in the end and I got my first good mark at ‘The Tute.’

I started smoking weed with a Jewish friend in the dorm during the holidays freshman year.

I lived up there a long time and during that time my sisters married guys from Jewish families. Someone asked my nephew what religion he was, and he said, “regular.”

When I moved home to New York again, I had a company called Kinetic Designs in Manhattan that did animations from CAD data, mainly for architects. We did jobs for all these great architects in the city, and then wound up doing it for all kinds of clients, including The Rolling Stones and other amazing people. I had a Guy named Guy working for me. He was from Israel. He was the same age as my brother James. They both had two sons during that time, and named them Aidan and Liam. Along with Michael, those are some old names that have appeared in both cultures for a long time. It was funny. Israel is still a leading marijuana country.

Running Curved Papers and sponsoring MJBA nationally with David Rheins, I have always enjoyed tagging along on his voyage year after year with the Jewish faith. He’s almost a New Yorker himself, after all. I guess 25 years at Rolling Stone and Spin should count for something. He’s up there on my lifelong list of favorite Jews, along with fellow left-handed, basketball-playing white guy and fellow Brooklynite, Bernie Sanders.

Let’s not forget real New Yorkers like Stu Zakim and Steve Bloom. Stu Zakim, New Jersey? Are you kidding me?

I digress, but I hope you’ll dash over to CurvedPapers.com/ChurvedChanukah and pick up a double four pack. All double four pack purchases through Christmas are qualified for the Grand Prize Drawing on Boxing Day, December 26th, also known as St. Stephens’s Day. Prizes will be awarded live on Zoom, and Curved Papers FB page, on Wednesday, December 28th, 2020 at 4:20pm EST, the third day of Kwanzaa. Be there or be square.

Enjoy the coming joint rolling season: Happy Hanukkah. Happy Holidaze 2020 to one and all!

And a happy New Year! There. I said it. Not too early. 2021 is gonna be a good year. But let’s do enjoy Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwaanza and all the vital festive traditions left in our crazy 2020 in the meantime.