I am a Christmas Jew

Before Fox News was around to warn us about the war on Christmas, before saying “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” this time of year became some sort of statement, before Elf on the Shelf and peppermint lattes, my family spent the better part of December celebrating Christmakwanzakuh. Coined via family brainstorm in 1995 or so, Christmakwanzakuh was a completely unironic linguistic representation of something that became a guiding philosophy in my life: celebrate all holidays!

Cultural hybridism is an American artform — one I mastered from an early age. You might say it was my destiny. My birth story began at a Passover sedar and ended a mere 48 hours later on Easter Sunday. My parents, both New Yorkers, raised me in Cincinnati, Ohio, where I learned to love knishes and Skyline chili in equal measure; I attended mostly black public schools, spent Sunday mornings at Hebrew school and Thursday nights at Irish dance classes; and come December, we’d celebrate Hanukkah and Christmas, and sometimes even Kwanza.

It never struck me as odd. Or contradictory. To be perfectly honest, it wasn’t until I met my husband, and saw it through his eyes, that I finally realized that many people think Judaism and Christmas are mutually exclusive. Maybe that’s because Christmas was such a secular affair in my house. I realize now that it was no coincidence that my father, who used to tell me he had excommunicated himself from the Catholic Church, called it Xmas. As fiercely as my father rejected the religious and institutional tenets of Catholicism, and enthusiastically embraced my mother’s Jewish heritage, he loved Christmas — I mean really, deeply, viscerally loved it. The music. The decorating. The cooking. The entertaining. The giving. The storytelling. The big family gatherings. These were the things he loved most all year round, but when Christmas came, he had an excuse to go all out — and that’s exactly what he did.

My dad prided himself on having the most eclectic Christmas music collection anyone had ever seen; on stocking the house with enough food and drink to host an unlimited number of visitors and well-wishers over the course of a few weeks; on finding the absolute best gift for everyone, including presents from Santa, wrapped in special Santa paper he must have been stockpiling — it was the same paper every year, for more than ten years.

So for us, as big of a deal as Christmas was, it was unequivocally secular — more like Thanksgiving with presents. It didn’t hurt that my Jewish mom had also grown up with secular Christmas. Hanukkah was our religious winter holiday, and even that took on its own hybrid character as we adapted it to our family and made it our own. Somehow it became a tradition to spend one night of Hanukkah at my Irish Catholic grandmother’s house, eating frozen latkes and decorating her Christmas tree.