I love Christmas as only a Jewish girl can — it’s amazing what 30 years of denial and guilt can do.
Growing up in Canarsie, it seemed we Jewish and Italian kids were all alike . . . until Christmas. Suddenly, TV was full of skating Santas, “A Charlie Brown Christmas” and “O Holy Night.”
Neighbors merrily strung up colored lights. If only we could join them!
“Santa, Shmanta,” my mother said, plugging in the electric menorah. “We have our own holiday.”
Well, sort of. Hanukkah at the Hoffmans’ was a streamlined, secular affair: no blessings, no parties. Just eight nights of bulb-screwing and eight mornings of gifts from “the Hanukkah elf,” who, judging from mornings 5 through 8, must have invested heavily in knee socks.
It certainly didn’t hold a candle to what they were doing at Lori DeVita’s house. Christmas mornings found the entire family knee-deep in wrapping paper. More thrilling still was the tree that sprouted in the middle of their living room, a towering confection of twinkling lights and satin balls.
One wintry day, I found it lying by the curb, stripped of everything but tinsel. I pulled off a few strands and draped them over a shrub in our yard.
“Hey!” Mom growled when she came home from work, tinsel spilling from her glove. “Who decorated the bush?”
Never mind that Uncle Mike (birth name: Meyer) had a 6-foot-tall “Hanukkah bush” in his house. My parents called that cheating.
The message was clear: No Christmas for us.
And that’s pretty much how it was, years after I left home and married Bruce, a former altar boy. His French-Scandinavian mother’s home was second only to Versailles on the decorating front.
Neighbors merrily strung up colored lights. If only we could join them!
Their Christmases had been spectacular. And while he happily embraced Hanukkah, he assured me that the whole “tree thing” was more pagan than anything else.
Nor was I the first Jew to adore Noël. Who do you think wrote “The Christmas Song,” “White Christmas” and “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing”? (Mel Tormé, Irving Berlin and Felix Mendelssohn — Jewish!)
In the supermarket one day, I saw a cute little Alberta spruce with a red bow on it. I brought it home and awkwardly attached a few ornaments someone had given me to its prickly little branches. No thunderbolts crashed through our living room.
The next year, I found something bigger. Soon my stepchildren and friends were sending us ornaments — stringed instruments, mostly, because I play the violin. Even so, I held my breath when my parents stopped by.
“Ohh!” Mom gasped. “It looks like the tree in Lincoln Center!”
That was 20 years ago. We’re doing 6-foot Fraser firs now, and our home is a magnet for wandering Jews — you’d be surprised just how well ham goes with potato pancakes! We’ve even adopted the traditional Italian Christmas Eve “feast of the fishes,” whittling down a dozen or so courses to three: shrimp cocktail, clams linguine and crab cakes — what my people call a treife trifecta.
Granted, it hasn’t been easy. When our son Sam was 5, he wanted to know why I loved our Christmas tree so much. I told him it was because, being Jewish, I’d never had one as a kid.
“Wow,” he sighed. “Glad I’m not Jewish!” That was the year he started Hebrew school.
So I felt comforted when Faye Kellerman, best-selling writer and Orthodox Jew, told me she’d grown up loving Christmas lights, too. “Now I have blue and white Hanukkah lights wrapped around the trees in my yard,” she said. “I see no harm in it, and they’re so beautiful.”
Sam’s grown now, and will probably make his own traditions. Depending on whom he marries, we may soon find ourselves celebrating Kwanzaa, or maybe even Tet.
No matter. The best holidays are all alike: a celebration of food, family and love — a triumph of light over darkness.
Merry everything, everyone!