The Glicks go a little stir crazy on Christmas.
Every year Eric and Jill Glick, a Jewish couple from Pikesville, try to dream up a different plan. Once they went to the home of Christian friends and watched the family celebrate. Another year they pretended to be Christian, after a fashion, and made a turkey-and-pumpkin-pie "Christmas dinner."
This year, they decided to forget it all and shoot pool.
"If we sat around the house, we'd be fighting by 2 o'clock," said Jill Glick, 34, as she sipped a Coke at Champion Billiards Cafe in Parkville. "If this place wasn't open I don't know what we'd do. We get antsy. Everything's closed."
For non-Christians, Dec. 25 is a day without meaning.
The Glicks were among the hundreds of thousands of Marylanders -- Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, atheists, agnostics, even lapsed Christians -- who did not celebrate yesterday.
At worst, Christmas Day can seem like a boisterous party taking place next door. In the best case, it's a day off, spent relaxing at the tail-end of or before other holidays -- Hanukkah, say, or Kwanzaa -- without any other spiritual or family obligation.
It was not a day to get much business done: The closing of government agencies and banks took care of that.
Most places closed
Options were limited. Schools and universities were closed. Libraries were closed. Hardware stores, florists, bookstores and museums, all shut. The Baltimore Ethical Society? Closed.
Most of the X-rated video stores on The Block were closed. Even the ubiquitous Donna's coffee bars were closed. (Except, of course, for the one in the heavily Jewish Pikesville.)
Gil Rosenbaum had visions of a romantic Christmas even though he celebrates Hanukkah. He thumbed through his address book and looked for all the names of single Jewish women and started calling them, figuring he knew they couldn't be busy.
"So I call one last week -- 'Stephanie, this is Gil. I was supposed to call you 34 years ago,' " said Mr. Rosenbaum, 51, a Baltimore native who returned home this week. Despite Mr. Rosenbaum's entreaties, Stephanie had other plans.
Chinese food tradition
For some Jews, the holiday was a time for movies and moo shu duck -- a tradition that seemingly stretches back to the days of Pharaoh.
"Did I go for Chinese food? You mean like the real Jews?" laughed Thomas E. Scheye, provost of Loyola College.
Dr. Scheye, who is Jewish, is married to a Catholic woman, and he celebrates both Hanukkah and Christmas. "We just enjoy the holiday, as we spin dreidels."
Mary Liu, a 28-year-old waitress at Uncle Lee's restaurant on Greenmount Avenue, immigrated to America from mainland China three years ago.
Asked if she celebrated Christmas, she explained that her father was a Communist.
"Usually, the Chinese, we just work on Christmas," she said, looking around the empty tables of the restaurant.
Those tables would fill up by dinner time, she said, mostly with Jewish families.
Once she left work, she might see a movie with her husband, Quaming Dong, a doctoral student in statistics at the Johns Hopkins University.
Or else, they, too, might head for dinner, also at a Chinese restaurant.
Routine maintained
There was little time for Christmas at the intersection of North Avenue and St. Paul Street in downtown Baltimore yesterday.
Karl Muhammed, 19, and Roland X, 35, plunked down cardboard boxes filled with bean pies and copies of the Final Call, the publication of the Nation of Islam.
As Black Muslims, they mark Christmas because they follow the teachings of Moses, Christ and Mohammed, Mr. Muhammed said.
But the two men, dressed in similar crisply cut raincoats and bow ties, spent Christmas hawking pies and papers, trying to spread Louis Farrakhan's word as they do every other day of the year.
The Glicks also followed a routine.
Like every year, they stocked up on groceries because they knew stores would be closed.
They deliberately slept late.
After trying a movie theater near their home in Pikesville, the Glicks gave up.
Too many other people had the same idea.
"I actually thought about going to my office," said Mr. Glick at lunchtime. "We'll probably have our briefcases out by 5 o'clock."
