My husband and I had been together for years before we married, so he knew what he was getting into. The Christmas thing, that is.
I was raised Catholic by scientist parents, and though the Catholicism seems to have dropped by the wayside, Christmas is still a sacred family holiday. My dad loves a celebration of any sort, and he’s passed that on to his kids. We have what might be the gaudiest tree in the world, with years of ornaments, starting with the one remaining plastic ornament my parents bought as newlyweds. We have ornaments we made as kids in school, ones we bought from the various universities we attended, and ones given to us by friends. We have theme ornaments. And every year lately I’ve been helping the grandchildren create handmade ones.
The result is a disordered, wild tree unlike those ones you see in department stores with matching lights and tasteful globes. You could say our tree is representative of our family…
My husband was raised by agnostic Jews who expressed their faith by trying to do the right thing. One branch of his family were union organizers. The first time he was going to meet my conservative dad, he said, “What should I tell him?” “The truth,” I answered. What was the point of hiding anything?
So when we started talking about having children, the issue of religion came up. “I want my kids raised Jewish,” my husband said. “What does that mean to you?” I answered.
It’s a question we’ve been trying to answer ever since.
To us as a family, being Jewish is not something you do by attending services and following dietary rules. We decided that to be Jewish, our children needed to have a sense of their history, where they come from. They needed to be literate in their religion, which would necessitate their completing their bar/bat mitzvah. And it definitely meant, we knew, that Christmas would not be happening in our house.
To a certain extent, I feel like random circumstances lobbed me an easy homerun. First of all, although I made a valiant effort to get away from my family by going to college across the country from them, I ended up living the closest to my parents of all my siblings. At about the time when I realized that I needed to move closer to my then-boyfriend to cut down on what we called the “love commute,” my parents found property nearby where my dad could raise wine grapes. We ended up living a 15 minutes’ drive away from each other.
This has made the Christmas thing easy. “Christmas happens at Nana and Grandpa’s house,” I tell my kids. And that’s that.
Also, because Christmas is so important to my family, there’s no whining and wailing by my kids to have it here. Christmas, to them, happens at their grandparents’ house. It happens with cousins and Nana’s excellent Christmas meal and the yule log and the tree. We’ve never had a tree here, or even a bush. And they don’t miss it.
Another way I’m lucky is that I’m my father’s daughter: I love a celebration even if it’s not the one I grew up with. At first, celebrating Chanukah was forced. My husband and I had to read up on the right foods to cook and the right prayers to say. But it’s gotten easier over the years. I wrote an article for this month’s Growing Up in Santa Cruz about families who don’t celebrate Christmas, and though it’s definitely a stretch for any family not to be part of the dominant culture, there’s a positive thing about being different. When your whole family is different, I think it makes it easier that YOU might be different. I know that when I was a child, growing up in a largely conformist Midwestern town, it felt wrong that I felt “different,” not part of the group.
For my kids, it’s a given. Before they were even conceived, we decided to make being Jewish the “normal” thing in their lives, and it’s worked. Whenever the subject of difference comes up in any context, they find it easy to accept. Kids whose behavior is different, adults who have different political ideas than we do, foreign languages and cultures — all this is simple for our kids to comprehend. Being part of a subculture has its benefits.
I’ve gotten very good at deflecting random comments that might be hurtful: “Have you decorated your Christmas tree yet?” the well-meaning grandmotherly woman asks at the party store. I just answer firmly and kindly, “We celebrate Chanukah.” My kids, on the other hand, look at her like she’s slightly insane.
“Who has Christmas at their house?” they seem to be saying. “We have Chanukah. Christmas happens at Nana’s.”
