I have very fond memories from the 1990s of listening to a friend’s Gujarati Indian immigrant family butcher Christmas carols.
It was an annual Christmas Eve tradition for these religious Hindus. Each year, with women on one side of the room and men on the other, the genders separated by the large, decorated tree, they joyously worked their way through about a half-dozen classics. Sometimes they sang in unison, and sometimes they traded parts while they consulted xeroxed lyric sheets. When it came to “Deck the Halls,” everyone always got a chuckle out of the men warbling “Fa la la la, La la la la!”
For me, an 20-something atheist half-Jew, it was a liberating experience.
If you have overwrought memories of and expectations for Christmas, it can be quite stressful. If you’ve become jaded about the holiday’s commercialism and relentlessness, it can be incessantly annoying. But if you’re Jewish, it can raise issues of inadequacy.
Christmas just seems like so much fun. For starters, there’s the Christmas tree, that coniferous shrine of positive reciprocity, which is certainly one of the coolest things in and of itself in the eyes of a child. And the litter of gifts it bears? For a pre-pubescent, the orgy of Christmas gifts is about as close as you get to sex.
But it wasn’t just tinsel and ribbons I envied. The seasonal kindness and fraternity that accompanies Christmas also made me jealous.
Goddamn if those Gentiles don’t seem like they’re having the time of their lives during the Christmas season. All of a sudden everyone is in such a good mood, doing nice things for each other, extending holiday greetings, and sharing moments of real, heart-felt sincerity. Christians, even relative strangers, have a way of looking in each other’s eyes during the Christmas season and saying just the nicest things in the world and seeming to really, really mean them.
Jews were never this nice to each other. Not in my experience anyway. Plenty nice, sure, yeah. But there was no equal sense of love for your fellow man, perhaps because we were each expected to pledge our loyalty to the tribe. There was certainly no religious experience as cathartically loving as Christmas. Passover is a wonderful time for families, but its spirit is more akin to the 1969 Mets winning the World Series than it is about unconditional love. And when we got together to really mean something on Yom Kippur, it was about bowing down and asking God to forgive us for our sins. Of course it was really great of God to do that for us, but what did we actually do for each other?
More than anything, I wanted to partake in the brotherhood of Peace on Earth and Goodwill towards Men. I wanted to look someone in the eye, shake their hand, and exchange that depth of love.
Consequently, to be a Jew is to be submerged into a pool of Christmastime envy for the better part of a month each year.
For many Jews, all that envy has created a desire to compete. The result has been the transformation of a relatively minor holiday, Chanukah, into something that attempts, but fails miserably, to ape Christmas. Every Jewish child is intimately familiar with the desire and pressure to have Chanukah vie with the distinctly American version of Christmas.
But Chanukah is a very poor substitute for Christmas.
By the Jewish lunar calendar, the sprawling eight days of Chanukah always take place some time in December, and tend to overlap with Christmas about every third year or so.
This simple coincidence of timing has elevated its importance for many Jews, placing it in the untenable position of trying to compete with THE American holiday. But Chanukah, the “Festival of Lights,” is quite inadequate when compared to Nöel.
For starters, a menorah can’t hold a candle to Christmas tree. And latkes are good, but they pale in comparison to the candy canes, gingerbread houses, and whatever the fuck else sugar plum fairy bullshit people cram in their mouths this time of year. And then there’s the dreidel. Yeah, it’s a top. That’s it.
But for kids, the real problems is all those goddamn gifts.
Historically, Chanukah has had little of anything to do with gift-giving. But in a failed attempt to compete with Christmas, in a vain effort to keep their children from feeling inadequate as their goyishe classmates drown in wrapping paper, Jewish parents often give their children some gifts during Chanukah.
It’s like offering a teenager a virgin colada while all the adults are drinking wine and cocktails at a wedding.
As I got older, my unrequited love for Christmas began to ease. Drifting into atheism helped. Leaving God behind washed from me much of the sectarian competition that is so rife among adherents of the major Western religions.
By my late teens and early 20s, Christmas was something I had gotten good at ignoring. It was that day when all the stores were closed. It was a good chance to see a movie and grab some Chinese food. You know, before all the gentiles also began to realize that this is actually a good way to spend a day off, especially after you’ve been cooped up with your family for far too long. Now? Now you can’t go near a theater on December 25th.
Tragic, really.
However, spending several Christmases with my Gujarati friend’s family was a real turning point. Because it helped crystalize for me the difference between the ancient Christian holiday that celebrates the birth of Jesus, and the secular American holiday that doesn’t have a damn thing to do with Jesus.
Three generations’ worth of Indian immigrants and their progeny would decorate a tree, wrap and exchange gifts, and even sing overtly religious songs like “Oh Holy Night.” They were Hindus. Not only weren’t they Christian, a number of them didn’t even really know all that much about Christianity. Yet there they were, not only “doing” Christmas, and not being threatened by it at all. Hell, they were enjoying it as much as the next guy.
Of course the War on Christmas agitators are largely full of shit. Christmas dominates American culture during the entire month of December and almost everybody celebrates in one way or another, including millions of non-Christians.
But the religious Christians who complain that one of their most sacred holidays has been exploited and debased by commerce and secularization? The folks who rail against “Xmas,” decrying the removal of “Christ” from “Christmas?”
I think they’re absolutely right.
For many Americans, Santa Clause is a more pivotal Christmas figure than Jesus. Elves and reindeer supplant angels and wise men. “Jingle Bell Rock” and “Winter Wonderland” are far more popular than “O Tannenbaum” or “Oh Holy Night.” And countless millions of Americans spend Christmas Eve opening gifts (or wrapping them at the last minute) instead of attending church.
In other words, my Indian friends weren’t singing the praises of Christ’s birth because they were about to convert. Rather, they were taking Christmas and making their own. They were turning something ostensibly Christian into something that was decidedly un-Christian.
In a nation where citizenship is based on a political ideal instead of an ethnicity, and where where national ethnicity itself, “American-ness,” is an incredibly dynamic and flexible thing, celebrating the secular, pop-culture version of Christmas is a fast track to actually being accepted. It’s a harmless (though potentially expensive) form of assimilation.
That’s what my Gujarati friends understood. Celebrating the birth of Christ is a way to be Christian. But decorating a tree, eating gingerbread cookies, exchanging gifts, and even singing “Fa La La La La,” is way to be American.
Thanks to them, I’ve come to embrace the secular form of Christmas, though only partially. I still don’t bother with a tree; it seems like too much trouble. And I can still hide behind being half-Jewish to avoid all that gifting. I don’t actually like giving or receiving gifts; I never know what to get anyone, and receiving gifts makes me uncomfortable.
Maybe I should speak to someone about that.
Anyway, the point is that I have found a way to partake in Christmas to some degree, and in the process, to share in the warmth and fellowship I always found so appealing.
Each Christmas Eve, an old friend and three generations of his small but energetic family host dinner and drinks at a tavern in the Washington Heights section of northern Manhattan. He invites friends, and typically anywhere from a dozen to twenty people show up. I’ve been going for about 15 years now. It’s a time to reconnect, break bread, toast, and revel in the glow of the Christmas season.
This weekend I’ll drive from Baltimore to New York City, and on Monday night, once again I’ll be at Coogan’s on W. 168th street. I’ll be back home, among friends, on Christmas. And this half-breed atheist Jew will be happy.
In that spirit, I wish you all a Merry Christmas.
Fa La La La La!
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A longer version of this piece entitled “The War On, For, or About Christmas” first appeared at 3 Quarks Daily.