Intro to Judaism - Week 7

The suggested topic for this week has several questions - but the last one is about Hanukkah, and my idea of Christmas has been so loaded that I feel compelled to focus on that. As with so many things during this journey, my thought process and beliefs have evolved so dramatically within such a short period of time that I wish I had approached this topic sooner, rather than having to try to capture it all within one post. I'm going to do my best, but it may be a bit scattered.

Earlier in the year (er, maybe even a couple months ago), Nicole and I had discussed keeping Christmas celebration to honor the culture and traditions of both of our families and what we have grown up with. We made it sound so great, right? Except that it was really a justification to keep something that seemed too difficult to give up. Celebrating Christmas in addition to the Jewish holidays made sense in Nicole's home growing up, and makes sense in many homes, because they are interfaith families. Having both come from families that celebrated Christmas does not make us an interfaith family. Our faith is Jewish, and our traditions and holidays should be Jewish (or secular, such as Halloween and Thanksgiving). And no, Christmas is not secular. Trying to make it so feels disingenuine, shameful to my newly forming Jewish identity, and irreverent toward a religion from which I separated myself with much respect.

My next step was to see if we could just have a Christmas tree, even if we otherwise tried to downplay the significance of the holiday. The idea of not having a Christmas tree hurt more than almost anything else. I can do without a lot of other decorations, I can do without lights on my house, I can even do without a pile of gifts. But I couldn't imagine not having a tree sparkling in the corner, filled with ornaments that have so much meaning and mark my path through life - new home ornaments, first married Christmas ornament with our wedding photo in it, a Christmas frame ornament with a picture of my beloved cat who died of cancer a few years ago, ornaments that I made when I was little.

Then I did the readings for class. *sigh* And like everything else, they make so much sense for me and detail what I know in my heart to be true, but with better context than I could have given it all by myself. How do you celebrate Hanukkah, a holiday that recalls a story in which a small group of Jews resisted assimilation into the larger culture, and then follow its tail by doing just that? What kind of message will I be sending my children?

It was hard for a while to think of not "giving" my children Christmas. And by Christmas, I don't mean the story of the birth of Jesus. I mean Santa and the excitement of waking up Christmas morning to a pile of gifts. But then I remember another conversation Nicole and I had when we first started house-hunting. It was so difficult for me to picture my kids growing up on these tiny plots with houses practically on top of each other. I grew up with a field next to and across from me in one house, and woods and a creek in my backyard in another. How could I not give my kids the experience of spending a Saturday afternoon building forts in the woods, playing "office" in a field, letting Barbies go for a dip in the creek? Then Nicole, who was born and raised here on Long Island, pointed out that she didn't feel that she herself had missed out that experience because she didn't know any different. Such a childhood is sentimental to me because it was MINE. My children won't know that, and their own sentimental memories will be about their little backyard and going to the playground up the street at the elementary school and taking trains into the city for events. Is that any less valuable?

Remembering that conversation helps me with this. My kids will not know Christmas. As sad as that may sound to some (Nicole's brother was in absolute shock and almost angry at what we are "denying" our children), what celebrations are YOU missing out on because they're part of someone else's culture, not yours? Being fun isn't reason enough to incorporate something into our lives that goes against what we believe in.

In one of the readings for this week, it said something to the effect of, "It's only hard to be a Jew if you don't like being a Jew." Being Jewish comes with year-round celebrations that our kids will be able to enjoy. Do they need Christmas when get to dress up in costume and celebrate Purim, and have major family celebrations and feasts around Passover and Rosh Hashana? They don't need everything - and what they do need is a solid sense of their Jewish identity with parents who are strong enough to make the best decisions for our family despite outside pressures.

I do want our children to be able to take part in the celebrations of their grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. But it should feel like it would for my parents coming over for Passover seder - an opportunity to spend time with family on a day that is festive and important to us, but still clearly not their own holiday. And we need to be sure to set boundaries to ensure that we aren't walking like a duck and talking like a duck but claiming not to be a duck. For instance, we could start our own tradition, since we will always have Christmas off of work and school, to go to a movie together and then maybe go to my in-laws' for Christmas dinner. Sure, they can give our kids a gift for Christmas, as is their tradition - but I would ask that they give the majority of them for Hanukkah, and I wouldn't want our kids going over there first thing Christmas morning. Or if we use the school break to travel to my parents', we should probably do it the week between Christmas and New Year's so that they aren't waking up in their home on Christmas.

Christmas is everywhere, both in our families and in our largely Catholic neighborhood, but we're not alone in this. We are a part of a large community of people who face the same saturation this time of year and who also have to help their kids navigate it. And it doesn't have to be easy. We certainly aren't giving our child a father because it's hard to be different or to miss out on an experience that most other kids have, and why should we feel obligated to do so with Christmas? Our family is already different, and being different is going to require many conversations and a lot of work that I am definitely willing to do.