Chanukah

For me, it usually works quite well when chanukah falls really early compared to the solar calendar. ( contains religion )

Jewish communities like to agonize about the "December dilemma" of what to do when you're a religious minority and everybody around you is celebrating Christmas. I've been pretty lucky in that it's never really been a problem for me. As a kid I enjoyed being different, and didn't feel any particular anxiety over celebrating the end of term with a bunch of parties and decorations (while I opted out of Nativity plays). While Christmas itself was usually a quiet time with family, watching the classic films they put on TV over the holidays (we never had a video player, so we could only watch stuff when it was broadcast). My birthday falls in the last days of the year, so when other kids were comparing what they got for Christmas, I could join in by talking about my birthday presents. In fact, I could very much relate to this account by the Velveteen Rabbi. Most of my life I've lived in areas with tiny Jewish communities, but still haven't found Christmas to be a problem.

I think the difficulty around Christmas happens not so much when "everybody" is celebrating, but when you have close relatives who are non-Jewish. This is the case for an increasingly large majority of Jews these days! It's particularly difficult when your non-Jewish relatives are your parents; not celebrating can then seem like deliberately spiting your family, or your spouse, because it's pretty tricky to negotiate a household where some of you are celebrating and some not. I think a lot of the problem is caused not so much by the non-Jewish relatives as by the Jewish community being snooty about making Not Celebrating Christmas somewhat of a cornerstone of Jewish identity; this doesn't really make sense for Jews by choice because it asks them to reject their cultural background, and it doesn't really make sense for inter-married Jews, because it requires them to be at best rather cold towards their spouse. Some communities of course specifically want to drive inter-married Jews away from the community; you won't be surprised to know I think this is the wrong choice!

When I was growing up, we sometimes had definitely-not-Christmas dinner, usually on Boxing Day just to underline the fact that we were celebrating family togetherness and not that Christian festival at all, no sir. But we had roast turkey and crackers and present-giving and so on. Some years it was with my cousins on my father's side, whose father, my uncle-by-marriage, isn't Jewish, and he reasonably enough wanted his (Jewish) children to experience his own childhood traditions along with their grandmother. Some years with my own grandmother who didn't come from a Jewish background and sometimes misses Christmas as a high point of the year.

Now I have a non-Jewish spouse of my own. We've built up some traditions that work well for everybody; it's become my habit to spend Christmas itself with his family. I think this works partly because my in-laws aren't particularly religious; Christmas for them isn't much different from the non-Christmas I grew up with, a little bit more specifically Christmassy, but not enough to make me feel weird about celebrating it. We sort of joke that we have it easy compared to a same-faith couple, because there's no question that we go to jack's family for Christmas and my family for Passover, so everything's simple. This year most of my sibs are likewise going to be spending Christmas with the families of their non-Jewish partners; I'm hoping that at least some of us will get together for the end of the year, but it might or might not happen.

Anyway, the main point of all that rambling was that I wanted to link to kerrypolka's excellently thinky piece: Cultural rituals and the christmaspocalypse.