December

[liv]

There's an idea mostly I think imported from American culture that Jews experience a "December Dilemma" over how much to participate in Christmas. I largely reject that framing, because I've always taken the position that my Jewish identity is far more than Not Celebrating Christmas. That said, I went to an interesting talk on a related topic this week, and also I find my interaction with Christmas has changed quite a lot and maybe it would be helpful or interesting to talk about it.

When we were children, we largely didn't do Christmas at home. But we did do a lot of positive things around being Jewish, celebrating the major festivals, keeping a fairly low-key version of kosher (sometimes called "Biblical kosher" in the sense that we didn't eat pork or shellfish, but also didn't keep most of the rabbinic dietary restrictions), attending synagogue and religion school regularly, having a family meal with candles and prayers every Friday night. So it never really felt like the whole not Christmas was a big deal.

Perhaps because Not Christmas wasn't the main part of our identity, we did in fact participate in some peripheral customs. Watching the Queen's Speech, doing the big Christmas cryptic crossword in the newspaper, enjoying a time when we could be sure the entire family would be at home with no work or school commitments, watching some of the Christmas special TV shows and films shown on TV. It was broadcast TV in those days, and my parents were entirely resistant to our begging for a VCR, so we could only watch whatever happened to be on the four public channels; the Christmas week was almost the only time we watched movies at all. My favourite was Ghost which was incredibly sentimental and incredibly 80s.

I was perfectly happy with this arrangement, I didn't at all feel left out from present-giving, decorating the house, eating roast turkey and trimmings (the traditional Christmas day meal in most of the UK). In fact, we sometimes did have a roast turkey dinner, crackers and presents; a few years we were invited when my Jewish aunt hosted her Christian mother-in-law for Christmas Dinner, and after my grandmother moved in with us we formed a tradition of having roast turkey on her birthday, which happens to be Boxing Day. Although she had followed in her definitely atheist parents' footsteps and rejected Christianity, I think she somewhat missed Christmas from her childhood, so having the meal, but on a different day, felt like a good compromise. I think also by that point we were considered old enough not to be "confused", there was no chance we teenagers were going to somehow think we were Christian if we ate turkey.

School was all Christmas all the time for most of the second half of the autumn term. Mostly it didn't bother me, other than when people were overly insistent that nativity plays and carols and learning about the Biblical story of Jesus were somehow universal, not religiously Christian. I don't remember ever being stuck in the bind many Jewish kids report of trying to avoid breaking their classmates' obviously absurd belief in Santa. Mainly it just didn't occur to me that anyone sincerely believed that a jolly red-suited man would climb down the chimney and bring presents to the good children each year. I assumed it was just a fun story and game for children, so there was no need to disillusion anyone or to avoid doing so, I went along with it the same I would with any pretend game.

I'm partly reminded of this because my Jewish friend's kid has just started school and she's in the same all Christmas all the time vortex that I was at her age. It seems she started out telling her teacher that she didn't celebrate Christmas on account of being Jewish, and the teacher, in a mistaken attempt to be inclusive, told her that it's ok, everyone is welcome to join in with Christmas. So of course now she wants to make endless endless Reception-style Christmas art, paper chains decorated with Christmassy symbols, pictures of Santa and his sleigh and reindeer, Christmas cards, tree ornaments for the tree she doesn't have... I think I was more firm in saying no to all that, certainly wasn't interested in bringing those sorts of art projects home from school, but I was quite a contrary child and I actively liked having an excuse to say no to things teachers asked me to do.

I suspect this kind of tension where the school wants all the class to join in with the Christmas "fun" but the Jewish kids (or at least their parents) would mostly rather not is more acute in the US. It looks from the outside like it's difficult to reconcile the emic where there is a First Amendment and religion is not at all allowed in public institutions including schools, with the etic that most of the US is culturally and indeed religiously Christian. I think this is where the December Dilemma originates; if Christmas is just holidays and eating comforting foods and having bright lights in the darkest part of the year, then of course it's applicable to Jews (and atheists and polytheists) as well as Christians. Jews are going to seem really ungracious if they opt out, likely surely you can't have a religious objection to having fun and being generous?

I've said before that I generally find actually religiously Christian Christmas far less problematic than the "secular" festival of peace and goodwill (and shopping and overeating). Because with the former it's very clear what my role is, if I'm invited as a guest then I can join as a guest, I'm in interfaith respecting other people's traditions mode. But secular Christmas is just hard because there's this really porous wobbly line between celebrating stuff I don't believe in like the Incarnation or people being materially rewarded for being "good", and just having fun end of year "seasonal" parties.

It's particularly a problem for me when people insist that something that looks overtly religious is definitely actually secular. If you're decking everything with holly, well, ok, holly is an evergreen with pretty red berries and it's one of the few sources of natural colour at this time of year, but also holly is the symbol of Jesus' saving blood. Bells are pretty and they sound nice, but bells are part of Christmas symbolism because they're associated with church bells. While I've mentioned that I have no problem being polite to people who want their children to believe in Santa, I do have a problem with people who want me to believe that myths and decorations about presents distributed by a Christian saint in honour of Jesus' birth is somehow secular. Over here, it's sincere most of the time, it's not people trying to trick me into doing Christian things against my will, it's that many people who celebrate Christmas in fact don't perceive it as a Christian thing, it's just what you do at this time of year. And since Christmas is so very much about universalism, there are a lot of people like the well-meaning Reception teacher I mentioned who really do think that they're being generous and welcoming by including everybody in their "festive" season.

I mentioned that my orientation to Christmas has changed. Well, as an adult I didn't bother with Christmas much, I'd attend work Christmas parties to a minimal extent but opt out of spending the whole of December looking for excuses to go out for food, drink and forced jollity. I didn't do Christmas at home, I didn't send cards or exchange presents. Then I started going out with jack and for some years joined in with his family of origin Christmas. Which really is genuinely secular and I felt extremely welcome as an in-law in his family. We have mostly moved on from this because of generational change; most of the older (grandparent) generation have died now, and many of our generation now have kids of their own, and we got to the point where we couldn't quite fit everybody around the table, so it made sense to prioritize the families with kids over jack and I as a childfree couple. His family still remember me and send me cards and small gifts each year, and actually doing Christmas just the two of us on our own really suits us.

8 years ago we started going out with the OSOs. Back then they were a religiously Catholic family and we were able to work out ways of joining in with their celebrations that didn't feel too awkward for a Christian-ish atheist and a Jewish guest. I had no problem, for example, helping to decorate the Christmas tree while singing carols, or stirring the Christmas pudding when the relevant Bible verses are read in church. In fact I quite enjoyed accompanying them to church during Advent because Catholic Advent makes theological sense to me: it's about living in a world still waiting for redemption. I drew the line at accompanying them to church for Midnight Mass on Christmas Day; perhaps that's not where the line should be, but having a line made it all easier. The family situation is more complicated now, some have drifted away from religion, some are not sure where they fit denominationally, and some are exploring whether they want to be a different religion. But we more or less have a family-of-choice set of Christmas traditions and that's great. Sometimes it overlaps with Chanukah, sometimes it doesn't, and either way is fine. It really helps that my family of origin have almost no claim on me at Christmas, so there isn't any of that, which side of the family should we go to for the holidays?

My partial celebration of Christmas with my family works really well for me. But it can be really tiresome to explain to Jewish acquaintances, some of whom do have more of an identity attachment to being Jewish means Not Celebrating Christmas. This is tied up with prejudices around mixed marriages. For example, when most services were on Zoom in 2020 and 21, members of my community got angry with me for having a Christmas tree visible in the Zoom cone during a Jewish service. It's jack's Christmas tree really, a lovely twinkly optic fibre thing which I'm really fond of. And I'm not ashamed of having it in the house because for me, being Jewish is about more than Not Having A Tree. I was fine with moving it out of the Zoom cone when people asked, I'm not setting out to offend anyone. But it really bothers me that, in a community where most people do end up celebrating some aspect of Christmas with non-Jewish family, neighbours and colleagues, we have to go through this pretense of not having Christmas decorations in a Jewish home.

And this is what we were talking about in the discussion this week. It was hosted by an author who has written a novel where the protagonist, like her, is a Jewish woman married to a non-Jewish man. She read an excerpt where the MC had initially not wanted any Christmas stuff in her home, and her husband, a secular atheist from a vaguely Christian background, had respected that. But their children had nagged them into incorporating more and more Christmas traditions, partly so they could fit in with their friends, and partly so that they could get presents. There was also discussion, both in the novel and arising from it, of the situation where the protag's parents and other family of origin somewhat disapproved of her relationship and eventual marriage, but also felt they shouldn't disapprove, but should live up to their generally liberal and multi-cultural values and not worry about the religion of someone's spouse as long as they're a good person and the couple are happy together.

That is very much my experience; few people overtly disapprove of my relationship situation, but lots of people feel uneasy about it and it comes out in things like being disproportionately angry that my mixed home contains a Christmas tree. And lots of people in the audience were nodding along and saying, definitely, that really captures what it's like to be married to a non-Jew in a mostly accepting but somewhat unsure Jewish context. But then someone asked the killer question: what about your children, did they marry in? To which the answer was, it's complicated, one of them had a Jewish partner but separated from them, one of them converted to Christianity and eventually was ordained as a priest. Well, there you go, then, just goes to show. I really hate that question because, well, if we're accepting of mixed marriages, which most agree in principle we should be, then it doesn't make sense to see it as a problem or a negative outcome when offspring of a mixed marriage themselves marry non-Jews.

The other thing I'm struggling with is that if we define Jewishness as Not Celebrating Christmas, where does that leave people who are Jews by choice? Almost all converts to Judaism are going to have some non-Jewish, usually Christian in the UK, family. Must they stop celebrating Christmas with their own family of origin to be seen as sincere? I am also noticing that there are lots and lots of resources and support groups for Jews with non-Jewish partners, set up in reaction to this conditional-at-best acceptance. And historically there was much more severe prejudice against Jews "marrying out" i.e. non-Jewish partners. But there aren't really any resources for Christians (or other people from other religious backgrounds, but it's Christians I'm most thinking about) who have Jewish partners, or Christian parents who turn out to have Jewish offspring. And in some ways that's appropriate because Christianity is after all the hegemony round here, but I'm thinking surely there must be something? Just because you're the majority and your loved one is the minority, doesn't mean everything is easy and peachy. In particular, the Jewish community's ambivalence around non-Jewish partners and participation in Christmas, along with our extreme reluctance to be doing anything that might be seen to be proselytizing, can feel really rejecting.

So actually maybe there is a December Dilemma for people who want to celebrate Christmas, and who want to be kind and welcoming to their Jewish dear ones, but don't always know how.

Comments

[jenett]

I think about this one a lot, but from a different angle: raised Episcopalian and converted to Roman Catholicism when I was 13, active Catholic through college, these days a witch and pagan.

There's a couple of parts of it for me. One is that I grew up with our customs being very heavily rooted in the religious aspects (we were pretty firm on Advent being a thing, not rushing into the Christmas part of it, multiple religious services, often because various people were singing/doing readings/etc. at them), and a certain amount of (in our case, very British mode - goose and Christmas pudding and crackers) food and celebration traditions.

But we're a very small family (my father died when I was 15, my siblings are significantly older, and we have no aunts or uncles or cousins), and when my siblings had kids who were small, we were in three very different locations (I was in Minnesota for much of that period, my brother and his family were in Connecticut, my mother was in Boston about 2 hours away, and my sister, BIL and my nephew were about 5 hours drive from me. But no one sensible plans on 5 hour drives in the upper Midwest in December if they can help it. Plus my BIL was a church organist, so up through the middle of Christmas Day was his super busy season, they couldn't travel, and there's a lot of general collapsing in a heap once you can to recover.)

So we didn't have the family focused part either (and in the interim, my mother stopped cooking, half the family is vegetarian, there's various other things that complicate being in the same place.) I flew out for the holidays a couple of times in there, but not super often.

And then there's the other part, which is that I am, it turns out, not okay with letting the non-religious celebration overrun my religious celebration and commitments. We manage the coven commitments by doing our Winter Solstice ritual early. (Solstice this year is the 21st, we're doing our coven ritual this Saturday, on the 18th, and then we don't schedule any coven stuff until after New Year's, so people can do family things and not feel swamped.)

My personal practices these days involve a vigil - or at least making a solid attempt at a vigil - staying up for the shortest night. I haven't made it through the night for a few years, I usually give up around 3-4am, with dawn a couple of hours away. But even making the attempt means rearranging my sleep schedule a lot and needing a couple of days to recover before I want to do much driving or being anywhere on a schedule. (I take that week off work, and the last few years, also the couple of work days in Christmas week.)

But making the attempt? That matters to me.

Having a winter solstice period where I am not very beholden to schedules or time or someone else's calendar? Turns out to be really important to me. It's a chance to rest and lie around reading on the couch and doing things without feeling like I'm on a hamster wheel of expectations. A chance to reset, to think about what I want in the coming year's cycle. When I do things (and this year I have a bunch of writing, editing, and writing admin stuff I want to do), they're the immersive 'sink into this for hours' that I have limited chances to do most of the time.

It's turned out to be worth fighting back against the societal assumptions - parties, family expectations (as opposed to family pleasures), the expectations of being super busy, of spending lots of money, etc.

It also means I get cranky about the centrality of Christmas (in terms of background music in stores, assumptions at the work holiday party, etc.) I actually like a lot of carols, I just... I want it to be quieter, sometimes. I want space for the darkness, so we can better see the light. I want all the sensory bombardment that is just chaos and tumult to go away for a bit.

And that's a really hard sell in mainstream society.

[liv]

Thank you, your comments are always so informative. I can imagine that the Catholic to Pagan trajectory is particularly hard, especially with all the random bits of nature symbolism that get tagged as "pagan" by people who are not at all in that tradition. I completely sympathize on the too much light and intrusive music and sensory bombardment, I find that wearing too but don't want to harsh other people's squee.

It's probably not that unusual for family Christmas dinner to fade into the background as generations move on and move apart geographically, but you have an actual reason not to want to take part in that family ritual. I'm really glad you've carved out a space where you can do your Winter Solstice properly and also get some time to recharge. I definitely like that about Christmas as a non-Christian; it's a week when the world mostly leaves you alone, if you choose not to participate in the busy-ness.

[adrian_turtle]

I started hearing about "The December Dilemna" in the 1990s, in the US. Mostly in upstate NY, but also to a certain extent in national publications. It was specifically about the dilemmas facing intermarried families and families including Jews-by-choice. Christmas celebrations at school are a different kind of thing than grandparents (or one of your parents) celebrating Christmas. I don't know when the term came to mean something more general.

[liv]

Oh, that's really interesting if the term "December Dilemma" originally applied specifically to Jewish people who have Christian relatives, rather than being a general problem for Jews who live in an officially secular but actually Christian society. That's sort of what I wanted it to mean, rather than the more general sense, so I'm pleased to hear that was the origin.

[independence1776]

The other thing I'm struggling with is that if we define Jewishness as Not Celebrating Christmas, where does that leave people who are Jews by choice? Almost all converts to Judaism are going to have some non-Jewish, usually Christian in the UK, family. Must they stop celebrating Christmas with their own family of origin to be seen as sincere? [...] But there aren't really any resources for [...] Christian parents who turn out to have Jewish offspring

As a single Jew by choice, this is something I struggle with every single year. On a personal level, I don't want much of anything to do with Christmas and I think a large part of that is that American society expects everyone to celebrate Christmas to the point of pretending large parts of it are secular even though they truly aren't, so I get grouchy. If it wasn't ubiquitous, I think I'd be less so. But my family obviously still celebrates Christmas and I can't opt out entirely. My line has settled around "I'll give and get presents on Christmas Day itself because I don't want to commercialize Hanukkah." But it still feels weird to do that. Some years, the holidays are easier than others. And yes, I do sometimes worry about not being considered "sincere" enough even though literally all I do is gifts and dinner (usually vegetarian lasagna). But what else am I supposed to do? My parents would be extremely hurt if I did nothing and they're more important to me than a nebulous "should not."

My family is happy to celebrate Hanukkah with me (read: eat latkes), so it's not as though I'm being ignored. But we've never had outside help to draw the line. It was something we figured out on our own. My rabbi asked about it as a matter of course during the conversion process, but he left it up to me to handle.

[yrieithydd]

I think a large part of that is that American society expects everyone to celebrate Christmas to the point of pretending large parts of it are secular even though they truly aren't, so I get grouchy.

American Christmas strikes me as weird and complicated because a lot of the first Christians who were puritans who banned Christmas but now Christmas is a massive family thing - and I remember one time when Christmas was a Sunday (like this year) hearing of big churches who cancelled their Sunday service so people could be with their families that day which struck me as really odd.

As a practising Christian who loves Advent - I find "society" Christmas weird especially the way it starts weeks before Christmas and then stops on Boxing day or possibly New Year's Eve - so that my keeping of Christmas and the wider society's overlap for 2-7 days. It's not the same as being of a different religion and being force fed Christmas though.

It also feels like as fewer people identify as Christians in the UK, Christmas has got bigger and bigger, especially Santa (who has taken over from Father Christmas now - which is arguably more Christian in being a historic saint, and yet I just think grrrr Americanisation). But it's empty, whilst also being the worst sort of colonial Christianity.

[independence1776]

Massive family thing, massive "love and peace and joy" thing*, massive consumer capitalism thing (this year, two weeks before Halloween, the Halloween-themed baking section in a local store had already been replaced by Christmas-themed baking items). It's a giant mess and I wish I could burrow under my covers and ignore it all.

* My own father has lectured me about me not having that kind of holiday spirit. This was after I became Jewish. Before I became Jewish, when I was a teenager, my Christmas grump was laughed with (not at) because I was "taking after" Dad's father who was also unenthusiastic. Now it seems like my feelings are an affront to them.

I remember one time when Christmas was a Sunday (like this year) hearing of big churches who cancelled their Sunday service so people could be with their families that day which struck me as really odd.

That strikes me as odd, too. I have no doubt it happens, but I don't think it's common. Could be wrong, though!

I find "society" Christmas weird especially the way it starts weeks before Christmas and then stops on Boxing day or possibly New Year's Eve

Honestly, I likewise find it weird. My parents will not take down their decorations until after January 6 because it's still Christmas until then. We never did much with Advent, but I now know someone who does, and I'm glad she and you have meaning in the holiday despite the hoopla surrounding it.

Santa (who has taken over from Father Christmas now

Seriously? That sucks.

[liv]

I've definitely heard that before from religious Christians, the massive expansion of secular shopping-and-parties Christmas basically eats Advent and gets in the way of celebrating Christmas properly at the appropriate time. Cancelling church services so people can be with their family sounds really awkward; what happens to single people or people whose family isn't supportive or within travelling distance? Let alone families who want to mark the religious festival in church.

[finding_helena]

As a formerly cultural-but-agnostic Christian who now does practice, I can co-sign this sentiment. I also love traditional Christmas carols but hate most secular "Christmas" music, and I spent years working in retail having it being played constantly for all of December. So that's frustrating. And it doesn't help that I'm married to a culturally-Christian humanist who doesn't like the music I like but likes some of the stuff I hate, and only celebrates the secular celebration. Net result is we barely play Christmas music at home at all. And I'm on my own to teach the kids about the religious aspect of the holiday, though we both take part in the process of trying to push back against the rampant commercialism and participating in charity drives.

At our church the big Christmas service is going to be on Christmas Eve (as usual) but they're having a small service on Christmas Day.

I sorta wish we could divorce the religious holiday from the secular celebration, but it would have some problematic implications too. Anyway, I know it's not going to happen.

[liv]

Yeah, solidarity. The Jewish community's over-insistence on Not Christmas can be a real problem for people in your sort of situation, so I'm really pushing back against it. I also have no desire to turn Chanukah into an alternative Christmas, I don't want a massive spending fest of buying big ticket presents for everyone I know so why would I try to incorporate that into my Jewish observance? It's really important not to hurt your parents, that's a much more core Jewish value than not having dinner with your family on a particular day of the year.

I'm interested to hear of your experience during your conversion journey; it's good that the rabbi asked but was non-judgemental. We used to have a conversion supervisor who would inspect people's homes during December to check there was no tinsel or tree, and I'm very much glad that's a thing of the past now. But I bet a lot of our conversands could do with some more guidance on a tricky topic, and it's not like it's a completely alien experience to most born Jews!

[independence1776]

It's really important not to hurt your parents, that's a much more core Jewish value than not having dinner with your family on a particular day of the year.

Exactly.

I'm interested to hear of your experience during your conversion journey; it's good that the rabbi asked but was non-judgemental.

Honestly, I barely remember that particular conversation it was such a non-issue. I remember him asking, I told him how I was handling everything, and he was pleased with it. I do remember feeling that I felt like I had to figure it out on my own, but there was (and is) a fairly large community of converts on Tumblr, so I was able to find other people's experiences to help guide me. Something more formalized I would have welcomed.

(Also, yikes about the conversion supervisor!)

[independence1776]

I kept meaning to link this; my synagogue's weekly email newsletter linked it this week. It's from the USCJ and entirely about navigating the holidays as an interfaith family. It's very much geared toward interfaith couples and families with children, not adults who converted and needing to deal with family of origin. But with some rephrasing it might be useful for the latter group.

https://mcusercontent.com/1b602691cc194ec4e4279b306/files/35311978-a07e-db96-0f45-ad0df04dfc69/December_Delights.pdf

[hellkitty]

This is a really thoughtprovoking post for me, because I just came out of a meeting for our ambulance company where we were talking about what holiday message we should put up on social media. I'm team "every holiday gets a post" because our community has just about every holiday in the community. I know this seems tangential to your topic but it's more food for thought about how everyone can feel seen, but not feel FORCED, to any celebration.

[liv]

I can't tell you how much I appreciate that you're being thoughtful about this. The balance between including everybody, and overwhelming people who aren't Christian with Be Merry Or Else! My former employer had a diversity campaign which made me feel far more alienated than anything that was purely about the dominant culture: they had a whole Twitter thing going on where people talked about how Christmas is celebrated differently in different countries, and isn't it fascinating that some people eat fish or ham for Christmas dinner instead of turkey? And it's like, great, not just everybody in the UK, but everybody in the entire world celebrates Christmas except you, you miserable little grinch. Diversity is good as long as everybody is Christian in diverse ways. I think one post, when people know you've also put out greetings for Diwali and Eid and so on, is a really kind and thoughtful approach.

[hashiveinu]

But there aren't really any resources for Christians (or other people from other religious backgrounds, but it's Christians I'm most thinking about) who have Jewish partners, or Christian parents who turn out to have Jewish offspring. And in some ways that's appropriate because Christianity is after all the hegemony round here, but I'm thinking surely there must be something? Just because you're the majority and your loved one is the minority, doesn't mean everything is easy and peachy.

To draw an analogy to another axis of oppression, PFLAG is a thing. I don't see why there shouldn't be resources.

[liv]

Yes, I was definitely thinking of that analogy when I wrote the post; I wasn't quite sure if it was appropriate to draw the comparison, but as long as they're not completely taking over all the resources, it does make sense for people on the majority side of the equation to be able to access some support.

[warriorsavant]

Much of the symbolism is pre-Christian, that got appropriated by Christians for Christmas (well, frankly, the whole holiday).

Disclaimer: I'm a secular Jew, married to a rarely-practicing Buddhist. I used to do the very American "Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Joyous Kwanza, etc, etc." Then like most everyone else, I switched to the all-inclusive "Happy Holidays." Now I've gone back to "Merry Christmas," because the rest were just "hey, we don't wanna be left out," but the holiday/holiday season is Christmas. Even very secular western societies make a big deal about Christmas. Yes, I can join a religious Christian party as a guest, but basically I enjoy Christmas festivities if they aren't overwhelming (i.e. stores playing Christmas Caroles from Nov 1st onward).

[liv]

I think you're absolutely right that it's more honest to call Christmas "Christmas" than "the holiday season". Chanukah and Kwanzaa just happen to be at this time of year, and sometimes they get a token nod when orgs are trying to be "inclusive", but really it's Christmas. Despite not being at all secular, I completely agree with you that it's fine to join a specific Christian celebration as a guest, but it's annoying to be constantly bombarded with Christmas everything for two months.

[warriorsavant]

Just a footnote, that both Christmas (in its pre-Christian form), and Hanukkah were probably originally Winter Solstice celebrations, so not coincidence that they happen around the same time. Kwanzaa was made up (well, all holidays were, but much more recently) and deliberately sited to be around the same time.

One year, Christmas, Hanukkah, and Ramadan were all within a week of each other, so put up a sign in my office wishing people all 3 of them, in 4 different languages (and 3 alphabets - I had help writing it).

[mrissa]

Hmm, as a person who is a particular kind of Christian or Christian-adjacent, one of the things that frustrates me about modern American Christianity as practiced is that you're absolutely right, the holiday season is Christmas. But that's a flattening. That misses so much.

In my family, between the middle of November and the middle of January, we observe:
Thanksgiving
Mikulas
Cookie Day (often a two-day celebration, one for making treats with gluten and one without)
Santa Lucia Day
Solstice
Little Christmas Eve
Christmas Eve
Christmas
Second Christmas
Sixth or Seventh Christmas usually depending--hypothetically we're observing all twelve but
New Year's Eve
New Year's Day
Twelfth Night/Epiphany

The ethnic mix of these is particular to our family, but they are each a different holiday. And the contemporary American "WOOOOO CHRISTMASTIME" celebration obscures that in ways I find upsetting and unhelpful.......but I can't argue that you're wrong and it doesn't. I just don't like that it does.

Lucia Dag is my favorite of these in some ways, and I've gotten more and more keen on LCE because LCE is ours, it's...we're having kottbullar a few hours after my cousins in Sweden are having kottbullar, progressing into smorgasbord a bit after their smorgasbord on Christmas Eve, and so on. And there are not billboards harrying me to get the kottbullar purchased, there aren't songs playing in the pharmacy when I pick up prescriptions that flatten and stereotype the family interactions on LCE, it's just...itself. Which I like a lot.

(I make no pretense that it's secular, though. Some of my Swedish cousins are Jewish, but that doesn't make LCE a secular holiday, it makes it a Christian holiday that they're observing with their Christian relations.)

[liv]

That's a hard thing, having one particular loud celebration of one variety of Christmas get in the way of your particular family traditions and heritage. I bet it's a lot more common than I might naively have realized.

I didn't know about Little Christmas Eve, even though I lived in Sweden for a while, I think I really only found out about the more commercial and public versions of jul. I did experience Lucia, but possibly it was more visible because it's earlier in the year. I always appreciate your posts on the day too.

[mrissa]

Thank you! And I agree, having Lucia Dag in mid-December makes separating it out somewhat easier than if it was December twenty-mumble.

[warriorsavant]

I’m pretty sure “Cookie Day” is not an official holiday anywhere, but perhaps it should be. Seems like you manage to have something to celebrate every day of the season, if not the entire year. Good for you.

Some of this raises questions - admittedly pure idle curiosity: what is your background(s) (religious & ethnic)? where do you live? do you practice any particular religion(s)?

[mrissa]

I'm an American from a family of mixed Norwegian, Swedish, and Saami heritage, and we are still in very close contact with the Swedes in particular--as in, my uncle in Stockholm has visited twice this year. I live in Minnesota, which means that if I say, "I'm going to be going to my great-aunt's for Little Christmas Eve, so I'm not free for a Zoom that night," there's like a 2% chance the other person will say, "oh cool!" and not "What? when? what?" Lotsa Scandosotans here.

The religious aspect I think plays somewhat into how strongly we dug our heels in on keeping the saffron buns and the smorgasbord and everything, because I'm from the Haugean tradition of Lutheran Christianity, which is a very very anti-establishment group. "Disorganized religion," we sometimes affectionately call it. Any organized church is purely optional, and they were historically a pretty stubborn people, not very welcome in Norway, pretty dedicated to "well FINE we'll do it our OWN way." I'm not currently affiliated with a religious group, but that background is pretty deep in the bones.

(Mikulas is something my housemate picked up from the time he was in Hungary. That one's not mine originally.)

[warriorsavant]

Thanks for the info. Agreed, Minnesota known for Scandinavians of various sorts. Also for stubborn people.

[rosefox]

I've sung in a lot of choruses that sang a lot of Christmas carols, and there was always a sense of "Well, we could include Hanukkah songs, but there aren't really any good ones". For years and years, I thought it was something I had to put up with in order to do communal singing in harmony. It made me very anti-Christmas and resentful.

Then I discovered nigunim singing and started getting a sense of how much beautiful Jewish choral music is out there, and now I have an entirely different grump about erasure. But because I do have that way of celebrating my Jewishness all year round, and more Jewish community in general, I'm more tolerant of Christmassy stuff everywhere. I might even go caroling sometime, since I still know all those harmonies. (Except my voice has dropped, so I'll have to learn new ones.) Having a culturally Jewish home base, as you did growing up, seems to really make a difference. I did grow up in a Jewish home, but from what we listened to, you'd think the last great Jewish musician was Benny Goodman, and there was not a lot of singing. It turns out that making music is a fundamental part of how I connect to culture and that feeling of belonging.

My Jewish grandparents used to have a Christmas party every year, which puzzled me until my mom explained it was to give all their Jewish friends somewhere to go on Christmas. I think about that a lot.

[hashiveinu]

Then I discovered nigunim singing and started getting a sense of how much beautiful Jewish choral music is out there, and now I have an entirely different grump about erasure.

Have you come across A Course in Jewish Choral Music?

[rosefox]

Oooooh, I had not! I don't usually do podcasts, but I might give that one a try. Thank you!

[hashiveinu]

It was super helpful and orienting to the repertoire for me when I started directing my synagogue's choir. And really fascinating. The series of episodes about the 19th century were especially nice, I thought.

(I also wouldn't particularly call it a "podcast," because it's mostly video with visuals.)

[liv]

I'm really, really glad that you found a Jewish musical tradition that works for you. For me niggunim don't really seem to fit in the same category as Christian-type choral singing. There is Jewish choral music, I mean it's not Bach, but the whole 19th century European Reform musical tradition does in fact exist and you're right to be grumpy about erasure. Almost worse is choruses presenting some of the most beautiful choral anthems in human history and then saying, oh well, I suppose we can add I had a little dreidl to the programme to be "inclusive".

But also I'm not a singer; I definitely do get something out of music as part of my religious connection, but it's never going to be the main thing for me. So although I was very fortunate to have a strong Jewish upbringing, it wasn't at all a musical one, to the point where I can't really transmit my basic tunes to my non-Jewish family who would love to learn them.

Having a party so Jewish people have somewhere to go is a lovely tradition, it's cousin to the sweet New York thing of Chinese restaurant Christmas.

[mrissa]

I am particularly indignant about this because so many of the Christmas songs that get chosen are so bad. So it's not like quality is being used as a filter when it's Christmas stuff that's familiar to the choir director. Harumph harumph harumph harumph.

[yalovetz]

Maybe my family is weird(?) but my dad grew up in an Orthodox household and also had a Christmas tree and Christmas stocking and received Christmas presents every year growing up. Members of my extended family also celebrate Christmas in an uncomplicated way and don't seem to feel like this in any way conflicts with their identity as Jews. They're not in mixed relationships and don't have anything else to do with Christianity.

I was raised celebrating Christmas. My parents are in a mixed relationship, but any Christian influences in the family are several generations back, and the explanations I was given for why we did the things we did all tied it to English folk practices about bringing light and warmth and greenery into the house in the middle of winter, which made sense to me. I stopped celebrating Christmas when I moved to Australia, because it was no longer taking place in the middle of winter, so those practices no longer made any sense in that context.

[liv]

Thank you, that's a really interesting example! I didn't want to speak about Orthodoxy because it's not my tradition, but it's definitely wrong to assume that the situation of Jewish people having non-Jewish relatives is only present in Progressive communities, and everybody, but everybody, is part of a non-Jewish broader community even if they everybody in a specific household or family is Jewish. Some of my family are/were like that too, they're from various different parts of the denominational spectrum but they keep English customs because they are English.

It makes sense to me that being neither in winter nor Christian you wouldn't celebrate Aussie Christmas. I have taken part in that a few times with my Australian cousins, but it definitely is weird doing all this midwinter symbolism, even the fake snow, in the middle of summer.

[hatam_soferet]

A lot of why I Very Don't Do Christmas is tied not so much to Judaism but to personal reaction from many years of secular-English-Christmas dreadfulness (family member tension around visits to or from other family members, a role as the fixer child who got to buffer all that, stress around Having To Get Everyone A Present (love is demonstrated and gauged by how much present you give someone. But then many people leave your present you got them behind. And many people give you things you don't like. So how do you assess how much you love them? It's very confusing), intense sibling rivalry sharpened by She Got Better Presents Than Me). In principle I think folk traditions about having light and greenery around solstice times are nice, but I still have this hardwired distaste for participating because it's all too closely linked to being the fixer child whose job was to enable false jollity in everyone else all season.

I also rather resent that they're spending basically an entire month in school on Christmas stuff. I think that Reception basically ought to be wall-to-wall dicking about anyway, so at the moment I'm not bothered about missing out on learning, but it fucks me right off that I got shitty letters about Too Much Absence because we were off for the chagim. Too Much Absence, Your Child's Education Will Suffer, You May Be Investigated And Liable For Fines, Each Missed Half-Day Represents A 5% Drop In Attainment or something like that--and yet it's perfectly okay to spend all of December doing Baby Jesus and screwing around having a Christmas Jumper Parade and having half-days off "because Christmas." I mean either admit that you're okay with spending 10% of the school year fucking about and get off my back about taking days off for the chagim, or else spend less time in December buggering about and actually focus on school.

And it annoys me that the nativity play and carol service is framed as a Religious Ed thing. It's bloody not, it's the nativity play, that's what all schools do, just own it and stop pretending that it has an impartial educational objective. The educational objective was originally making sure all children turned into good little Christians, and now you want to pretend it's an etic thing because other ethnic groups have legal rights in this country. Etic my arse.

[liv]

So many hugs. I suppose I was writing about the perspective of people for whom Christmas was attractive and they felt they needed to give it up or do without it. But absolutely, for lots of people Christmas is mostly dreadful. The fixer child situations sounds rubbish, and I'm not at all surprised you want to be shot of it.

I really do think the school are being maximally unhelpful about this. The absence system is extremely bad and sending threat letters to parents who take their children out of school for important occasions (or indeed who miss school for health reasons) just shouldn't be happening, irrespective of Christmas. But yes, there's also too much Christmas in December, it would be better to just start the holidays earlier than to have such a long autumn term that everybody's too exhausted to actually teach or learn by the final month, and then spend that time enforcing attendance but playing silly games. I did definitely find nativity plays educational as a kid, at least the first couple of times, but you're quite right that it is in fact a Christian custom primarily.

[sorcyress]

Bells are pretty and they sound nice, but bells are part of Christmas symbolism because they're associated with church bells.

(background context, since I kept trying to add it in parentheses and getting clunky: I am American, raised "easter bunny and santa claus Christian" and also somewhat pagan. My family celebrated solstice in a religious sense with candles and ritual and reflection, and Christmas in an open presents and eat dinner with extended family sense. The number of times I attended ANY formal religious service growing up is in the single digits, and a third of them were going to synagogue rather than church)

I've taken up English Change Ringing in the last half-decade, which is on this side of the pond an *extremely* niche and weird hobby that no one has heard of. Subsequently, I have spent significantly more time in churches in the last five years than in the 28 before them.

It turns out to be a hobby I _really really love_ because of the mathematical patterns involved and the careful physical skill and the community and teamwork and the one-room-schoolhouse teaching style we run, and the going out for lunch afterwards with a friendly group of nerds. But it's been weird for me to run into the occasional recollection that there is, I suppose, a religious aspect as well? Which like, obviously yes, the Sunday ringing is literally called service ringing, but we're (mostly) not actually attending the services! I'd say of the two dozen regular ringers in Boston, there are three people I've heard mention regularly going to "church" for reasons other than ringing.

On the plus side, this does make it easier to find cute bellringer cards or swag around this time of year. :P

***

Which is all to say, since I've thoroughly digressed from your own point, that I appreciate you sharing about your own balance around religious and cultural observations, and probably want to make my own longer post about mine. Thank you for sharing!

~Sor

[liv]

Oh believe me, I love change ringing. I'm British and somewhat of a maths nerd, of course I love actual church bells. I'm really glad you found an opportunity to take part in such a cool hobby even though it's not mainstream in your culture.

My problem is not at all churches ringing bells as part of their Christian tradition. It's people putting bells all over everything and saying, oh, it's not a Christian symbol, bells are just seasonal. I like the idea of using bell stuff as bell-ringer swag though.

[meepettemu]

This was interesting - thank you.

I suspect most people (like me) don’t think much around the symbolism. You mentioned holly and bells. It never occurred to me that they were symbolic, as a child who grew up in an atheist house, who converted at 14-21 into Christianity. I’m not aware of ever being made aware of the links and certainly I didn’t make those links for myself. I suspect many of us don’t - we blithely accept the symbolism on cards etc as being ‘Christmas’ and carry on regardless!

[sfred]

Thank you for writing this.

It had never occurred to me that holly was used symbolically, either, except in that one song where it's crowbarred in to link general midwinter stuff with Christianity.

A podcast I listen to, Chutzpod, had a discussion of similar topics.

[naraht]

The other thing I'm struggling with is that if we define Jewishness as Not Celebrating Christmas, where does that leave people who are Jews by choice? Almost all converts to Judaism are going to have some non-Jewish, usually Christian in the UK, family. Must they stop celebrating Christmas with their own family of origin to be seen as sincere?

For what it's worth, no one has suggested that to me. The line in my Masorti conversion class was "it's fine to visit your family of origin at Christmas, and for them to have a Christmas tree, just don't have one yourself." This seems perfectly reasonable to me, and I really haven't felt any issues, but I do have a very accepting family.

I will say that I find people in the UK weirdly aggressive, compared to America, about pushing the idea that Christmas is secular and therefore everyone ought to celebrate it. My arts sector workplace, which prides itself on believing in inclusiveness (more in the theory than the reality) threw a Christmas party every year without even thinking twice about it, which I don't think an equivalent organisation would do in the States. Obviously there are all sorts of culture war issues around Christmas in the US, but there is at least a recognition that multiculturalism means that not everyone is celebrating the same holidays.