Amy Krouse Rosenthal
1.
"There was the Christmas when I was growing up where we went to my cousin Andy’s in-laws’ house. We were greeted at the door by a warm and gracious, albeit unfamiliar, matriarch. After being motioned inside and handing over our coats, we gathered in the living room with the other also unfamiliar guests. We half chitchatted, half waited for our cousin and his family to appear. The dialogue had to have been stilted and off-kilter, not unlike the odd feeling of trying to make sense of a conversation when you’re catching only every third word. Twenty minutes later, and still no cousin. Could he really be tied up this long with guests in another room? We finally—because we are smart that way—realized that we were not at our cousin’s in-laws’ house at all. Oh, you want the Cairo family! You want the house next door! We wondered who you were, too! Oh well, nice to meet you, folks! Take care! Merry Christmas!
There was the Christmas not too long ago when I went head to head with a virus that was clearly not on holiday. This nasty and persistent little bug first had its way with my insides. That was followed by a few hours of commercial-free vomiting. Next came the passing out in the bathtub trick, where I came to only after flooding the bathroom and the entire bedroom. Then I pretended I was fine (fooling exactly zero people), deteriorated to the point of hallucinations, and ultimately ended up in the hospital.
Those were weird and unfortunate Christmases, respectively. But the worst Christmas I ever had was, hands down, the Christmas I found out I wasn’t Christian.
2.
I was eight. I knew I was Jewish on some level. I knew I wasn’t Christian like other people were Christian. But I thought I was some sort of you-got-Judaism-on-my-Christianity/no-you-got-Christianity-on-my-Judaism amalgam. See, there’s Orthodox Jews, Conservative Jews, Reformed Jews, and Children-of-the-’70s Jews. All the Jewish kids I grew up with were pretty much a member of that last sect. I don’t say it like oh, everyone was doing it as a way to make it sound more acceptable. I say it because in retrospect I find it interesting when you look at it in its historical context, how the pendulum/Jewish households swung after World War II. There were a great many little Jewish boys and girls all over the country who had trees in their living rooms, stockings on their mantels, and chocolate chip cookies for Santa on the table.
3.
This stocking footnote: My grandmother’s friend Gladys knit one for each of us four children. They were red and happy looking, with spots of soft white fur and our names along the top. They were a treasure, and they represented everything that was merry about Christmas.
Shortly after meeting my husband, another child of the ’70s, I discovered that he also had his very own “Gladys stocking.” Turns out that Jason’s grandmother was friendly with the queen knitter as well. This certainly goes back to the point about the prevalence of the Christmas spirit across the faiths in my generation, but it’s also just a nice bit of serendipity, wouldn’t you say?
4.
The year 1973 was when my parents agreed it was time to pack up the ornaments and bring out the Judaism. Up until then, our Jewish rituals consisted of Chinese food for dinner every Sunday night, being scolded in Yidlish (half English, half Yiddish, as in, Oy, vay iz mir, turn off The Brady Bunch and clean up this mess), and one full-fledged holiday—Passover at my aunt Barbara and uncle Henry’s. We had joined our first temple earlier that year—I was starting Sunday school—and it was the rabbi who suggested to my folks that having a Christmas tree might be, you know, a tad conflicting for a Jewish child. Interestingly, all of our ornaments were hand-me-downs from another Jewish family, good friends of my parents whose kids were a few years older than us, and they had come to this exact same Christmas/Hanukkah crossroad (no pun intended, but I do rather like it) a few years before.
I suppose then that my worst Christmas was technically my first non-Christmas. All my prior Christmases, as best as I can remember, were pretty white, bright, and excellent. We went from Christmas morning to Christmas mourning.
5.
Looking back on this time, I would say that I remember Christmas feeling very big, and Hanukkah feeling very small. It was as if the day after Thanksgiving someone flipped a switch and Christmas was “on” everywhere. People’s houses were magnificently decorated. (Where did all those lights come from? Who’s making them blink on and off like that? How’d they get that big plastic Santa on the roof?) Mothers and daughters wore red-and-green matching knit sweaters. Frosty and Charlie Brown and Miracle on 34th Street came back from wherever they had been hibernating and permeated the tube. Talk of stocking stuffers and gifts was omnipresent. Everyone knew on Tuesday that there were 16 shopping days left, and then everyone agreed on Wednesday that there were 15 days left. Candy canes were everywhere in such abundance—at school, at stores, at the car wash—that you could eat one without your mom counting it as dessert, almost like we were obligated to help consume them. And so in contrast to all this, Hanukkah felt like a P.S. It also felt distinctly foreign and insular, like a science experiment with confusing instructions that you tried to figure out all by yourself in the basement.
6.
That first Hanukkah may not have entered with a bang, but it did enter with a bush—the never-popular Hanukkah bush. (My sister recalls it this way: “Man, that thing was cheap.” Not surprisingly, my parents didn’t bother with the stout plastic shrubbery after that first year.) Digging deep into my memory, I see some fuzzy, halfhearted dreidel-playing—that really never really caught on, either. However, those coin chocolates wrapped in pinched gold foil—that was something we could get excited about. My mom serenaded us with “Herman the Hanukkah Candle,” sung to the tune of “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Where she learned this, I have no idea. But it was cute and sweet, in a sad, consolation-prize kind of way.
What was truly special about Hanukkah—aside from the fact that as long as you ended it with an h and inserted a k or two in there, you could pretty much spell it any way you wanted—was the lighting of the menorah. Unlike the Hanukkah bush, unlike Herman T.H.C., the menorah was all ours. It wasn’t borrowed or adapted or a Jewish version of a Christian something. It would be years before I completely understood the hows and whys of Hanukkah, but I did understand, from the very first candle on that very first night, that it was beautiful and it made us quiet and that it was something I rightfully and naturally belonged to.
7.
As a Jewish adult living in a Christian world, I find that most people generally assume everyone celebrates Christmas. And that’s okay. We get to wade in some of the joy and jingle without having to do any of the heavy lifting. “Merry Christmas!” a clerk will say as I leave a store. “Merry Christmas to you, too!” I’ll say, like I’m one with humanity. I know people mean it more in a polite way—more akin to “Have a good weekend!” than “Happy birth of Jesus!”—so I typically just go along with it. On the rare occasion where I do say, “Well, actually, I’m Jewish, so I don’t celebrate Christmas, I celebrate Hanukkah,” there’s this awkward apologizing and backtracking. “Have a great New Year,” we’ll agree, and that’s always a nice peace offering.
(It does happen, and not infrequently, I should say, that someone who knows I’m Jewish will be confused about how I, as a Jewish person, operate in the month of December. If I had a dime for every time someone said to me, “I know you’re Jewish, but you still, like, celebrate Christmas, right?” I would be set for life in Hanukkah gelt.)
8.
It’s 2005. I have a family of my own. Our youngest child just turned eight. Our kids have never had a Christmas, good or bad.
We have Shabbat dinner every Friday, and we say the prayers. In addition to Passover and the high holidays, we’ve added Purim, Sukkoth, and Simchat Torah to our holiday shindig repertoire. Our oldest child is studying for his Bar Mitzvah. Pre-marriage, I backpacked through Israel, and my folks have traveled there twice in the last few years. Our journey, our transformation, is by no means unique—it is true for so many of the Jewish families I know in all corners of the country.
While Jason and I still cherish our merry pair of Gladys stockings, the box we unpack every December contains not ornaments but a collection of menorahs our kids have made over the years. Hanukkah no longer feels small to me. It feels big—big, bright, good, and full of chocolate.