Stories abound of Jewish people who grow up warm and secure in their faith. Those for whom the eight days of Hanukah didn’t compete with Christmas: Jewish nurses, firefighters, and doctors who take Christmas Eve shifts to ensure their Christian brethren are home for the holidays. These are the lucky Jews with traditions of Chinese food and a movie on Christmas.

I wasn’t one of them.

I grew up with my nose pressed right up to the glass. Like any other bird, blind to the barrier between the glowing scene inside and me, I banged until my nose almost broke.

I track my Christmas progress each year—today, I approach Xmas 2023.

There were no Hanukkah traditions in my house. (Adam Sandler’s Hanukkah songs make me blue with envy) so I longed for the sparkles of Christmas. Finally, one year, my sister and I hung stockings (actually, our socks) on our bedroom doorknobs. 

Mom was out on a date; we stayed up as late as possible until exhaustion sent us to bed, both of us giddy with the prospect of what would be spilling out the tops of those socks. Like in the books! Like the movies! 

All we’d previously lacked were the smarts to put our socks out! Duh!

We didn’t know what Christmas stockings should hold in the coming morning, but we knew it must be pretty darn special for the world to hang them while shouting—Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas. I’m sure my poor mother either didn’t notice the socks or, more likely, swore at us for leaving our clothes all over. 

Whatever Mom thought, no sparkles greeted us that Christmas morning. (Though, not to present us as all-pathetic: as seen below, we had dolls in our Brooklyn apartment!)

Years later, at 13, I spent one Christmas with my BFF’s Protestant family and had my first experience with a tree! I tried to be whatever I considered adorably Christian so they’d invite me back. They did not.

As a teen, I went out with my similarly Christmas-deprived Jewish best friend and bought a tiny Charlie Brown-style pathetic tree on Christmas Eve. (Another movie!!) and put it up in her room, decorating it with God knows what. Our long dangling hippy earrings? Her mother rolled her eyes.

Finally, I left home and gave up the Christmas ghost for a few blessed too-cool-for-holiday years.

Then I became a mother. Christmas reared its head. My children would have a giant piece of American pie! Why shouldn’t Santa love us? We lived with a non-Jewish couple in a big old Victorian House, and I fell into celebrating Christmas as though I were Jesus’ sister. 

Religion played no role for any of us; my outsider status faded as we celebrated an orgy of food, presents, lights, goodwill, and Christmas stockings so full we always needed an overflow bag. The only flies in my Christmas pie were friends, people who’d never stepped in a church, exclaiming, “What! You celebrate Christmas?” as though I were crashing their very own personal gates of heaven.

As my kids got older, I considered retreating into Hanukah celebrations, but I had nothing to draw on—and now a grandchild (with a non-Jewish father) had joined us, so I saved all my Jewish mojo for Passover, not having an ounce of Easter envy.

I continued to feel like I was Barbra Streisand in “The Way We Were.” Santa was the Robert Redford I’d never genuinely possess. He’d hang out with me for years but never really committed. 

Santa was the married man with whom I cheated.

Gradually, my trees went from light-crusted towering evergreens to miniature rosemary trees to a weird steel Crate & Barrel thing; sentimental ornaments line my window along with Stars of David. My holiday morphs yearly, stumbling from empty socks to dripping tinsel to latkes and macaroons laced next to candy canes (but always Rosenfeld’s bagels.) 

Orgies of presents flipped from being Chanukah-anointed to Christmas-assigned and back again.

One year, when the kids were away, we went almost full-on Hanukkah: Brisket, latkes, and potato kugel, and to make sure we stayed ecumenical, cookies from the local Italian bakery. To the great glee of my (Jewish) husband, who’s been generous and kind in his acceptance of his once-a-year-faux-Shiksa wife, we returned to our roots by watching movies and eating pan-fried ravioli. 

But, of course, on Dec 25, I woke up feeling bleak and empty-socked, wondering if Santa Baby and I were breaking up or just on a break.

Now I’m older. Much. I try to see more clearly. I hope I’ve given my daughters a fun merry-go-round of cultural inclusion and the knowledge that no matter what, we belong. I accept that I’ve not given them any holiday movie life (but at least we never have a single political argument!)

In the end, forgive me this day, my Santa jealousy. Growing up in a world where something is shining on a mountain where everyone except you is allowed to climb up is tough. Was it such a sin to dip a Jewish toe into this holiday ocean of goodwill? I envied those who could turn their backs, but I didn’t have the will to spend the day at the movies.

I know what my head-long plunge into my insane version of a Christmas-Hanukkah-Macaroon-Candy-Cane-Latkes holiday represents. Like every human on this earth, my past shaped me. 

Some of us learn from experience; some suffer forever—with luck, we knit new ways to keep warm.

Gifting those I love makes me extraordinarily happy. Watching my grandson smile when he holds just the right book, my daughters are wrapped in the softest of scarfs; my son-in-law was made happy because I followed his list to the letter, and my (ever-patient) husband showers with the world of gifts me as he’s taken it on to be my very own holiday savior brings me joy.

When my husband shleps out at 7 am to get the freshest bagels at Rosenfeld’s for Christmas morning, he gifts me with his open heart, shows me the most real of love, and keeps building our mixed-up traditions.

Is my holiday mixed up and lacking boundaries? Yes. But with wars killing millions in the name of religion, I’ll take my swirling mess of a holiday. I’ll happily embrace any and all joy and fight any and all hate.

My family includes a plethora of identities—cultural, religious, gender-spectrum, talents, neuro, city, country— perhaps if all of us opened our hearts to a bit of borrowing and a cup of kindness about sharing, we’d build a more loving world. 

And my 2023 lesson? Learning that a dear friend, a friend of this decade—thus unaware of how deeply my not fitting in goes, excellent writer Lynne Hugo, had Hannukah envy.

She wrote to wish me a Happy Hannukah, adding that she was “consumed by all the buying frenzy and the stress and the overspending. Guilty! Of yielding to “tradition” and pressure. In my fantasy life, Hanukkah is much easier and more lovely. Is there any truth to that? I’m thinking of you and hoping these eight days bring you time with your girls and grandson.”

And thus began an eye-opening grass-is-not-always-greener conversation.

And now, less than a week before Christmas, I have Covid. And does my bagel-man. And Rosenfeld’s is closed this Christmas (because it falls on a Monday.) 

And some of our family will be away, so we’ll celebrate Festivus after New Year. 

If we test negative, some of us will open some presents (cause, presents!) and stockings (not socks.) If we’re still testing positive, we shall survive. Because as I remind myself more each year, may this be the worst thing that ever happened to you! 

So, for 2023, I am grateful for the health and protection of my friends and family. I am praying for those in danger. I am fearful for those falling into fear of ‘the other.’ And more than anything, may freedom and safety ring for all in this world.

Thus, I gave myself a holiday present this year by donating to and joining the Interfaith Alliance, a group that believes:

At a moment when our interfaith relationships are facing unprecedented strain, we are reminded that it is precisely those relationships built on solidarity and trust that have sustained us in working to build a more resilient, inclusive democracy for all.

For all.

Always.