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It was my way, I suppose
This year I feel less in tune with Christmas than any year I can previously remember. I'm not surprised. This year the top-down national rhetoric is all about the celebration of Christmas as an affirmation of Christian supremacy, white Christian supremacy in particular—it's not just a national holiday, it's a blow on the front lines for Jesus. Jesus of the prosperity gospel, flaxen-haired Jesus of the Evangelical Right. Combating the war on Christmas. Putting the Christ back in "Happy Holidays." Like most of this adminstration's actions, of course, it's an act of theft and exclusion, but it has succeeded in making me feel alienated from and ambivalent about about a holiday I have never celebrated religiously. There is exactly one setting in which I will accept "Onward, Christian Soldiers" and that's the finale of Powell and Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale (1944). Where it works beautifully, by the way.
I was raised with a Christmas tree. My mother is Jewish and her family never celebrated Christmas, not even with the traditional Chinese food and a movie. (She's not sure there were Chinese restaurants in Norman, Oklahoma in the 1950's.) My father is an atheist whose closest thing to a chosen religious tradition was the Ethical Culture Society of New York City, i.e., not very close at all. They made the decision to raise me and my brother with secular American Christmas, I suspect in something of the same spirit in which they bought me a pair of Gap jeans right before I entered the public school system in seventh grade: the option of the mainstream. And yet my oldest ornament is a star of David molded from amber-colored glass. I hang it first on the tree every year. (A Hanukkah tree? Only in Chelm.) I find it fascinating that children of my generation really were raised to believe in Santa Claus, because there was never any pretense on my parents' part, just one gift every year that was signed simply and mysteriously "S." Our ghost story for Christmas is my grandfather's yahrzeit candle, which I lit last night to burn through the day of Christmas Eve.
But every year we make eggnog according to my family's screamingly alcoholic recipe and we make a plum pudding according to the recipe my mother and I have adapted into edibility over the years and we invite people over and it may be Christmas as it evolved over the twentieth century with a generous infusion of Jewish songwriting and the weird half-supernatural hangover of Hollywood, but I am not going to give it up just because our current government is apocalypse-bent on shifting the goalposts of America to something very narrow, and very rich, and very Christian, and very white. I didn't see It's a Wonderful Life (1946) until I was out of grad school, but I will fight you over Alastair Sim's Scrooge (1951) and that one invented scene in A Tale of Two Cities (1935) that introduced me to "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen," which is incidentally where this entire post started as I tramped around Harvard Square with some slightly mangled lines from Chapter 5 in my head. It's not my religion and it never will be, but it is my holiday, and I will keep it. Hanukkah is to say we don't assimilate. Christmas with my family says: but this is ours, too. And you don't get to take it.
I was raised with a Christmas tree. My mother is Jewish and her family never celebrated Christmas, not even with the traditional Chinese food and a movie. (She's not sure there were Chinese restaurants in Norman, Oklahoma in the 1950's.) My father is an atheist whose closest thing to a chosen religious tradition was the Ethical Culture Society of New York City, i.e., not very close at all. They made the decision to raise me and my brother with secular American Christmas, I suspect in something of the same spirit in which they bought me a pair of Gap jeans right before I entered the public school system in seventh grade: the option of the mainstream. And yet my oldest ornament is a star of David molded from amber-colored glass. I hang it first on the tree every year. (A Hanukkah tree? Only in Chelm.) I find it fascinating that children of my generation really were raised to believe in Santa Claus, because there was never any pretense on my parents' part, just one gift every year that was signed simply and mysteriously "S." Our ghost story for Christmas is my grandfather's yahrzeit candle, which I lit last night to burn through the day of Christmas Eve.
But every year we make eggnog according to my family's screamingly alcoholic recipe and we make a plum pudding according to the recipe my mother and I have adapted into edibility over the years and we invite people over and it may be Christmas as it evolved over the twentieth century with a generous infusion of Jewish songwriting and the weird half-supernatural hangover of Hollywood, but I am not going to give it up just because our current government is apocalypse-bent on shifting the goalposts of America to something very narrow, and very rich, and very Christian, and very white. I didn't see It's a Wonderful Life (1946) until I was out of grad school, but I will fight you over Alastair Sim's Scrooge (1951) and that one invented scene in A Tale of Two Cities (1935) that introduced me to "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen," which is incidentally where this entire post started as I tramped around Harvard Square with some slightly mangled lines from Chapter 5 in my head. It's not my religion and it never will be, but it is my holiday, and I will keep it. Hanukkah is to say we don't assimilate. Christmas with my family says: but this is ours, too. And you don't get to take it.
no subject
It is mostly because of TBD. For most of the run-up, they clearly had learned to believe in Santa Clause through osmosis from preschool, especially classmates but also we suspect the teachers. Janni is practicing Reform Jewish, and we're raising TBD same -- within the house, Hanukkah has been the primary celebration and gifting time. I was raised by agnostic/atheist parents who celebrated a thoroughly secular Christmas, and we've generally continued to time getting together and exchanging seasonal gifts with them around it. We were mostly amused by TBD's repeated singing of "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town" (which we never taught them) until we realized they were giddy/anxious to have been seen as Good in order to get presents. Oops. So over the few days before The Day, we introduced the concept that Santa Claus is part of a game that many families like to play, and that he's only in stories ("I knew that!" was the slightly too quick response). We then relabeled one gift to them as from Santa, by way of participating in the game. Between this and TBD's desires,* we've put up far more decorations than, well, ever.
They were befuddled when we explained that they shouldn't explain to their friends that Santa Claus is a game (other families get to chose how to play it). I hope not too many beloved myths are exploded today, on return to preschool.
* I had to make several origami flowers to adorn my parents' rosemary bush trimmed to Xmas-tree shape.