(published VC Reporter 12/14/06)
(part of compilation: Naughty and Nice/Snarky to syrupy, these four holiday essays will put you in the mood)
When people find out I’m Jewish (and with a last name like Freedenberg, it usually doesn’t take that long), they assume this time of year is all about Hanukkah for me: dreidels and menorahs and eating at Chinese restaurants on Christmas day.
Which is when I have to explain two things. First, I’m half-Jewish, which means there’s a whole side of my family who know more about rosaries than Rosh Hashanah. And secondly, the Jewish side of my family weren’t exactly Hasidic.
When I was a kid, my dad always made an important distinction between Judaism as a culture and Judaism as a religion. He was always proud of the fact that being Jewish, unlike being Baptist or Mormon, meant you were associated with a community on both of these levels. I think it was also a justification for calling ourselves Jewish even though my Dad hardly ever went to temple, we never ate kosher, and we only occasionally celebrated Jewish holidays (and even then, it was according to books like Passover in Twenty Minutes).
Furthermore, there are photos of my Dad as a kid in Brooklyn celebrating Christmas with his full-Jewish family, a phenomenon I can only explain as a result of assimilation. (When my grandparents’ parents came to New York from Eastern Europe, they must have picked up the tradition of Christmas trees and gift-giving as a way to fit in with their neighbors, or embrace American culture, or — dare I think it? — to renounce the culture that caused their necessary flight from their homeland.) There are more family photos of my Woody Allen-esque dad, his mom, Martha, and his father, Harold, sitting around a Christmas tree than there are of them lighting menorahs or praying over Shabbat candles.
When I asked my Dad why this was, he would only say, “Christmas is a national holiday.”
That’s when I began to realize that so, in a sense, is Hanukkah.
The thing is, Hanukkah as a holiday isn’t really that big of a deal in Jewish culture — more like Arbor Day or maybe Memorial Day than Christmas. It’s only because of its proximity to Christmas (which, by the way, also was scheduled in December for its proximity to pagan winter solstice rituals) that it gets much attention at all. And so Hanukkah as the Jewish kids’ Christmas is really an American invention, one born either of (at best) the altruistic desire not to leave anyone out or (at worst) the capitalistic desire not to miss out on any marketing opportunities.
Sure, Jews across the world do celebrate the festival of lights. There are menorahs with one candle lit each night. There are dreidels (and the ubiquitous dreidel song). There are chocolate coins wrapped in gold foil (called “gelt,” the German/Yiddish word for “money”) and there are small gifts given.
But what most people think of as Hanukkah — a kind of Christmas celebration where the tree is decorated in blue and the mountain of gifts is opened over the course of a week instead of in one morning — is a fairly new, and very New World, phenomenon.
And so at my Dad’s house in December, we always had a Christmas tree — one of the kinds with stiff, flat branches — decorated in colored balls, candy canes, tinsel and the occasional menorah or dreidel ornament. There were stockings hanging from the fireplace. Outside, the eaves and the bushes were decorated with Hanukkah-blue lights. Inside, menorahs sat alongside red-and-green candlesticks. Some years we’d have a lighting ceremony or two, though hardly ever eight in a row. Other years, we’d celebrate Hanukkah and Christmas together on Christmas Day — the pile of presents wrapped in poinsettia-themed paper were for Christmas, and the one or two small boxes (usually Jewish-themed jewelry) wrapped in silver or blue were for Hanukkah. And if it was a really special year, perhaps my stepmom would make latkes (potato pancakes) or my grandmother would make strudel, or maybe we’d spend one night of Hanukkah at the house of Jewish family friends (who, I suspected, were just as sporadic and “reform” about their Hanukkahs as we were.)
Neither celebration was particularly religious. But both were profoundly cultural. One connected us to the culture we’re living in; and one connected us to the culture we came from — if only in an abstract, symbolic way.
Now that my dad has died and I’m an adult, my Winter holiday leanings tend more towards Christmas than Hanukkah. But I still feel a sense of connection, ownership and pride when it comes to the latter. Whether I choose to acknowledge the holiday or not, the fact that I have that choice is a reminder that I belong to a special, rare group of people: to my particular family, to the American Jews throughout history who have improvised and adapted to incorporate their traditions with their new culture, and to the Jews throughout time.
So, Merry Christmas and l’chaim. And to all a good night.
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