“You’re Jewish?”

Oh no.

Oh no.

Michael had heard her. And for all that she was angry at Roy, this was not what she wanted to come out of it.

The plus side was that in the furor that Michael started up over her being Jewish, Roy ended up throwing up his hands and leaving her alone, stalking down to the warehouse to work.

Or maybe that wasn’t a positive, since it meant that the two of them hadn’t actually worked anything out, and he was scheduled to fly out to California that night.

Which was also the first night of Chanukah, of course.

On top of that, it meant that she was at the tender mercy of Michael with a new piece of knowledge in his grasp, and doing his usual over the top reaction to any kind of news, particularly any news about someone in the office who was anything other than a straight white Anglo-Saxon Protestant man.

He called an emergency meeting of the party planning committee, which had the effect of pulling Angela out of what she said was a very important spreadsheet reconciliation meeting with Kevin, which in turn meant that the meeting went from the usual Michael-led disaster to a compounded one where Angela kept glaring at her every three seconds.

It wasn’t her fault that Michael had decided that they needed to transform the Christmas party and Secret Santa into a combined Chanukah/Christmas party! It definitely wasn’t her fault that he had apparently Googled “Chanukah” exactly once and decided that the best way to do this was to have seven additional Secret Santa exchanges, one for each day of Chanukah, “only we can get someone to dress up as Judah Maccabee and hand out the presents!” It definitely definitely wasn’t her fault that he wanted to put an Israeli flag on the top of the little office Christmas tree.

None of that was Chanukah content, and she didn’t want any of it to happen either! She was on Angela’s side for once! But that didn’t seem to matter. Instead, it just meant that Michael was sulking at her too while Angela was still glaring daggers.

Then Michael went and made it worse by demanding that they put it to an office-wide vote, instead of just the planning committee, which had Pam thinking that she just ought to change her name and move to Kentucky in order to avoid the inevitability of Angela hunting her down, murdering her, and feeding her to her cats.

All in the spirit of Christmas, of course.

Fortunately, no one in the office was willing to back up Michael’s plans. Even Dwight took one look at the steam that was metaphorically coming out of Angela’s ears and hid in the bathroom instead of voting. One more point of evidence in her theory that Dwight and Angela were a thing, but that didn’t exactly feel like a triumph after Michael stomped off into his office insisting that “you’re all anti-Semitic! And that goes double for Pam!”

She slumped into her desk. Just how she wanted to start her day.

And it only got worse from there, somehow. Jim was out of the office that morning on a sales call, so there was no one to buffer her from Dwight when he emerged from the bathroom and came over to chat about her Judaism—or even for her to roll her eyes at when he did.

At least he was being kind, she thought, as he offered to bring in a menorah for the office if she wanted. Before she could refuse—she really, really didn’t want her religion to be an issue in the workplace, thank you very much—he casually mentioned that his grandfather had picked it up “sometime in the 1930s, from his neighbors the Gottliebs, when they moved,” and she suddenly found herself with an overwhelming need to run to the bathroom herself.

Unfortunately he seemed to take this as a yes, somehow, because when she came out he told her that Mose would be dropping it off in the afternoon, “assuming that he doesn’t get hit on the interstate when walking over.”

Then Michael called her into his office and proceeded to ask her a series of unnecessary and frankly inappropriate questions about whether she thought Jan was maybe Jewish too and whether that meant she would give him extra money in the budget to do Chanuchristmakkah Secret Maccabees without Angela’s help.

Pam seriously considered whether she could get away with unplugging his phone from the desk before he called and asked Jan himself.

In the end, she pointed out that he’d have to involve Toby and HR if he wanted to find out any other employee’s religious affiliation or act on it in any way, and breathed a sigh of relief when he just shouted “oh God no!” instead of remembering that Jan wasn’t a branch employee and thus it would be corporate HR, not branch HR, who would be in charge of her records.

Not that the company actually kept any religious records, but she wasn’t going to point that out either because then he would call Jan and they would have another sensitivity training, which she had less interest in than she did in discussing circumcision with Michael, which he also tried to bring up.

It was a massive relief when Jim finally walked in after lunch. Of course, she couldn’t just explain everything he’d missed to him—she really didn’t want to know what he’d have to say about her argument with Roy—but it was simply a relief to see a friendly face.

Then Michael went ahead and blurted it all out anyway, hollering at Jim about his Chanuchristmakkah idea and insinuating that Jim, as a reasonable, rational person, would definitely support having seven more Secret Santa exchanges.

Jim’s eyes widened and she wondered which part of that he found most objectionable.

She wouldn’t find out, though, because Angela happened to be dropping off more files in the front office at that moment and she just screamed when she realized that Michael was bringing it up again.

Pam had to admit that Angela actually had pretty good pitch, and a surprisingly high singing voice given her speaking voice.

At exactly that moment, Mose walked through the doors as she was screaming, carrying a beautiful glass hanukkiah that Pam really, really didn’t want to acknowledge the probable provenance of.

She would never know for sure, however, because it was immediately smashed into a million little pieces on the floor. She couldn’t be sure, looking back, if Angela’s scream had actually smashed the glass, or if Mose had simply clapped his hands over his ears, ignoring what he was carrying, and let the menorah hit the tile at full speed.

Either way, she walked straight out of the office, shoes crinkling on priceless historical glass, and made her way home.

Or tried to make her way home. Because when she got out to the parking lot, the truck was gone.

Apparently Roy had decided he needed to get to the airport early for his flight.