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

[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.