On My Love/Hate/Love Relationship with Christmas
As with most societal norms and widespread cultural traditions, my relationship with Christmas is…complicated.
(And not just because I’m Jewish.)
LOVE
I don’t remember when I first learned that my family and I were not Christmas people. Some of my earliest memories of Christmas were the annual parties at my father’s office, wherein the other children were tripping over each other to make it to Santa’s lap and I wanted absolutely nothing to do with him. I was inherently fearful of any individual with an obscured or masked face for most of my youth: folks in masks, costumed characters at theme parks and, especially, clowns. I also had an inherent fear of the supernatural or legendary: vampires and werewolves, but also leprechauns, tooth fairies, easter bunnies, etc. Santa, by all logic, fell into both categories, so my interest in Christmas in general was minimal as it involved, to some degree, interacting with the costumed man with the flying sleds and bewitched forest creatures. I’m pretty sure I did ask my parents why we did not have a Christmas tree and they responded with something along the lines of “we don’t do that,” but the question was definitely more motivated by a desire to make sure our chimney was secure from any potential nocturnal invaders than anything else.
Despite my aversion to the season’s most famous figurehead, my primary association with Christmas, from an early age, was the mall. From shortly after my family moved to the United States, my mother was involved with an organization called Women’s American O.R.T.. To this day, I do not know what their mission was, but I do know that it involved charitable work and that their most profitable fundraiser was their holiday gift wrapping booth at the Pheasant Lane Mall in Nashua, NH. Every year from Thanksgiving to Christmas Eve, I would essentially spend every non-school (or Hebrew School) hour tucked away in a corner of “The Booth” reading or playing or watching my parents or my sister or other members of the Nashua Jewish community engaged in small talk as they wrapped gifts. Some of my fondest memories were of the breaks we took to wander the mall to buy our own copy of a gift one of my parents had wrapped a few hours earlier for someone else (Hellooo Wallace and Gromit VHS set) or to sit and eat together in the food court. I wasn’t connected to the holiday itself; those weren’t our gifts being wrapped after all. They, and Christmas itself, belonged to someone else. I WAS, however, connected to our small little corner of the holiday, and the associated rhythms and movements which came with it.
HATE
So, what changed? Not much, honestly. Rather, it was my perception of things that changed. Or, more to the point, it was changed for me.
Since time immemorial, there are certain truths that are undeniable. And one of these undeniable truths is especially acute: middle schoolers are assholes.
Or at least they were in Southern New Hampshire in 1998.
The ages of 11 to 14 were — and continue to be — the perfect intersection of high self awareness and low self esteem. Which means, amongst other things, any deviation from the norm was discouraged both externally and internally.
And boy, was I deviated.
In a middle school of well over 1500 kids, there were other nerds of course. Other kids who loved Star Wars and a few who still played Pokemon, plenty who watched Dragon Ball Z and a smattering who read comics and Harry Potter. But the Jewish thing? Yeah. Not too many Jews at Mastricola Middle School. And nothing, NOTHING makes a Jewish kid stand out more than Christmas Time. (Especially when the two other Jewish kids in the school were from mixed families and thus had access to Christmas that I did not.)
This is around the time in this piece when I might as well mention Hanukkah.
When it comes to Hanukkah in the United States, Jewish families exist on a spectrum which, for lack of a better metaphor, has two poles. One the one end, we have those firmly opposed to any equivocation between Christmas and Hanukkah. In Jewish tradition, Hanukkah is one of the more minor holidays and some opt to still treat it that way and resist the popularized definition of Hanukkah as “the Jewish Christmas.” In other words, no gifts, no pomp and circumstance, and a rigid commitment to keeping Hanukkah and Christmas separated. On the other end of the spectrum are those who fully embrace Hanukkah as the Jewish Christmas; replete with Hanukkah Socks and Hanukkah Harry and Mensches on Benches and Hanukkah Bushes. Let’s be real, it’s hard explaining to most Jewish kids that they don’t get the mythology and, more pressingly, the gifts that come with the season, especially if they are largely assimilated into mainstream American culture the majority of the time. So it’s unsurprising, if not understandable, that families would develop traditions which approximated those of America’s favorite holiday and the commercial inclinations that come along with it. Most families though, mine included, exist somewhere between these two poles, embracing some aspects of the season and abandoning others. In my case, it did NOT mean eight nights of presents or top loading the best stuff onto the first night, as it did for other families. In my case, it was often small gifts on 3–4 of the nights and the big ticket item on the last night; my parents’ way of trying to insert meaning into the full eight nights beyond the presents by building anticipation toward the main event.
While there wasn’t much of a meaningful difference beyond timing between the gifts I received and my friends did, Hanukkah regardless never measured up in the Court of Middle School Public Opinion. At the end of the day, I was still the kid…the only kid…who did not celebrate Christmas. Different was different and different was cause for ridicule, isolation, and indifference. And when faced with that, who wouldn’t respond with rage?
Cut to: an unyielding hatred of Christmas: forbidding my mother from hanging blue and white lights, avoiding the radio for the entire month of December, sitting silent during the annual holiday concert, and most definitely snapping at anyone who would dare wish me a “Merry Christmas.” I was the very definition of a Grinch, who may as well have been my personal hero. Seeing grass on Christmas Day ALWAYS brought a smile to my face.
I simply wanted nothing to do with Christmas. After all, it wanted nothing to do with me, right? Even after I changed schools and began attending a Jewish Day School where the kids who DID celebrate Christmas were in a stark minority of their own, my opinion did not waver. And my presence on Team Anti-Christmas would remain absolute for a very long time.
LOVE
The first time my future wife took me home for Winter Break, I didn’t quite know what to expect. I knew from talking to her that her childhood was full of Hanukkah traditions that were both very foreign (Hanukkah Socks) and very familiar (small gifts leading to bigger ones) to me, but Hanukkah had already come and gone, so the point was moot. Being that our winter breaks were determined by the Gregorian calendar, we’d be there for Christmas, not Hanukkah anyway.
My wife and I, Hanukkah practices aside, grew up in very different Jewish worlds. In New Hampshire, Jews are an endangered species. In Queens, to say the absolute least, they are not. Which means Christmas Day itself was experienced very differently for us. For me, especially after the hurricane that was “The Booth” on Christmas Eve, it was a day filled with boredom and leftovers. It was not until close to my teenage years that the movie theaters began opening midday, offering us a reprieve if I could convince my Dad to get out of bed, but beyond that Southern NH was a Saint Nick-induced ghost town. New York, on the other hand, with sizable Jewish and Asian populations, provided regular and storied access to the two “Jewish Christmas” essentials: movies and Chinese Food.
While I was culturally aware of these two seasonal staples, they always existed in the category of “what other people do” (sorta like…ya know…Christmas). Which is probably why I was surprised at how busy the movie theaters were and how far in advance we needed to order dinner if we wanted to eat before midnight. This was not simply Jews finding something to do to kill time while the goyim opened their presents and ate their ham, this was a tradition and industry all on its own. I fell in love immediately.
A few years and a wedding later, and I found myself looking forward to my movies and my sesame chicken more and more, with (Jewish) Christmas somewhat ironically taking a place of great reverence in my annual calendar. It was a day that came to symbolize togetherness, family, stories, and good food for me, much as it always had been for my non-Jewish brethren — just with an egg roll swapped in for a pine tree and crab rangoon swapped in for ornaments. My softening attitude toward to ward the day itself had a ripple effect, at least as far as Christmas music and movies and Starbucks seasonal drinks were concerned (but never…NEVER before Thanksgiving).
I even grew suspicious of the term “Happy Holidays” even though I once championed it. After countless well-intentioned but poorly informed gentiles wished me a Happy Hanukkah on December 25th, weeks after the conclusion of the holiday, I began wondering as to the effectiveness of an inclusive term that didn’t seem to really promote all that much inclusivity. On Christmas, I began saying Merry Christmas (or Crimmus or Crimbus or Crampus) and my transformation was complete.
Looking back on it, did I hold on to my middle school contrarian angst just a little too long? Maybe, maybe not. On the one hand, when faced with punishing social and cultural classification, finding whatever logic one needs to not feel ostracized, to make the ones doing the persecuting out to be the ones in the wrong, is simple human nature. And on the other hand, after a while, my distain was definitely more about proving a point to no one than actually standing for anything. And so, we move on, with one more reason to look ahead with love and not behind with hate. And isn’t that the whole point of this exercise?
Happy Crimbus, y’all!
