When my son was a baby 10 years ago, I ordered a dinosaur-shaped menorah from Etsy. It was the first menorah I’d ever owned. When it arrived, I thought the seller had made a mistake when crafting this Judeo-paleo artifact because there were nine spots for candles. Um, hi, Hanukkah is eight nights, duh. It wasn’t until I looked up “how to light a menorah” that I realized the ninth candle was the shamash, the candle used to light the other candles.
Oh.
I must have missed that detail in my half-Jew upbringing. I grew up the child of a Jewish father and a Christian mother, in Taylorville, the county seat of rural Christian County, Illinois (real name of the county!), which didn’t have a ton of Jews around other than my family. And now I was just an impostor, trying to give my kid a tradition I never grew up with even though it kinda sorta belonged to my identity, and failing miserably. I didn’t even really know the story of Hanukkah, other than it had something to do with lights (I think?).
Here’s how my family celebrated Hanukkah: We didn’t. Not a menorah or dreidel in sight except in rare circumstances.
Here’s how my family celebrated Christmas: Way over the top. To the hilt. Sleigh bells jingling, ring-ting tingling too.
Neither of my parents were religious, and they chose not to raise my brother and me with any particular religion. “You can choose when you grow up,” they always said. We didn’t go to church or temple, we didn’t say grace before dinner, and we didn’t celebrate religious holidays. Except for Christmas, which I guess technically is a religious holiday, being about the birth of Christ and all, but ours was a secular, consumerist celebration.
And oh did we celebrate! We had a sacred set of traditions and rituals for the Christmas season, deviation from which was frowned upon and questioned.
My dad was the third generation to run our family shoe and clothing store, Summer’s. Retail revolves around Christmas, the shopping season that (hopefully) puts every store in the black for the year. Starting around Halloween, my dad worked even longer hours than usual. The store (we all just called it “the store”) extended its hours for November and December, staying open later on weeknights and opening on Sundays.
While my dad did his best to sell the good folks of Taylorville all they needed for their Christmas gifts, my mom was the Christmas cruise director, managing all the house decorating, tree procuring, cookie baking, and general magic making that we demand of our mothers in this society. (She did all this while also working extra long hours at the store, it must be noted.)
The festivities kicked off after Thanksgiving. My brother and I would go with my mom to pick out a Christmas tree from the local Boy Scouts, who sold trees and wreaths every year. Invariably, the tree we chose looked perfectly straight in the lot but was very obviously crooked when we saw it in our family room. My mom would drag up all the decorations from the basement and spend an entire afternoon decorating the house, which smelled vaguely of pine and cinnamon for the next month. The fireplace mantle brimmed with red and green tchotchkes. The stockings, the lights, the wreaths, the random weird (somewhat creepy) Santa figurines – my mom had it all. My favorite was the advent calendar, because we got a piece of candy each day in December. I didn’t know until I was much older that “advent” was a specific Christian term to describe the period of anticipation for the birth of Christ, not for the arrival of Santa. When I learned that, it made me feel funny and weird about advent calendars, like most overtly religious things make me feel. Our Christmas was a fully secular one, centered around the jolly man with flying reindeer, not Jesus.
My Jewish grandparents came over every year to help us decorate the tree. (My mom’s side of the family lived across the country, and we didn’t usually have holidays with them.) Once the ornaments were hung and tinsel was strung, we’d turn off the lights and plug in the string lights on the tree. My brother and I would lie on our stomachs, heads propped up on our hands, gazing up at this beautiful, sparkling tree. Magic.
Christmas Eve was my favorite day of the year, hands down. My dad would wear something festive and goofy to work, like a brick-red suit or a Santa hat. My mom would bring my brother and me up to the store around 3pm or so. We’d hang out with my parents and grandparents and all the employees, who felt like family to us. There were always last-minute shoppers, begging my dad to help them find something for their uncle or their father-in-law. He always came through, and convinced them to pick up some socks too, for stocking stuffers.
When the last customer finally left, usually with several bags full of those famous bright red Summer’s boxes, my dad would lock the door behind him and breathe a deep sigh of relief.
“We made it,” my dad said to all the employees. “Merry Christmas, everyone!”
“Thanks, Mark, Merry Christmas to you, too,” they’d reply. Occasionally I heard a “Happy Hanukkah, Mark!” When I was growing up, sometimes people in Taylorville would wish me “Happy Hanukkah,” and I never knew how to take that. I felt like I hadn’t earned it, like it didn’t belong to me. I was also highly aware that pretty much no one else besides my family was Jewish in Taylorville. Someone wishing me “Happy Hanukkah” was a reminder that I was not of them, I did not belong with them. On the other hand, my extended Jewish family members usually wished me “Merry Christmas,” not “Happy Hanukkah,” a reminder that I wasn’t of them either, I didn’t belong with them either. I was a holiday chameleon, slipping back and forth from Christmas to Hanukkah, based not on how I viewed myself (not that I had any sense of myself at that age) but based on how others viewed me. And how others viewed me always seemed to be distinct and separate from what they were. If they were Christian, I was Jewish. If they were Jewish, I was Christian.
Christmas Eve found my family at my grandparents’ house – my immediate family, aunts, uncles, cousins. We devoured my grandma's famous crab dip and other noshes, and then exchanged gifts, leaving heaps of shredded wrapping paper on the white shag carpeting. My dad is one of four siblings and the only one who married a non-Jew, and when I was a kid, I never questioned why we all gathered for Christmas. Just a bunch of Jews (except for my mom and whatever you’d call my brother and me) celebrating Christmas Eve!
Christmas morning was a highly choreographed timeline – my brother and I wake up, try to wake up my parents who pretend to be asleep, they then get up but claim they have to brush their teeth and get coffee (which they do soooooo slooooowwwwlllyyyyyy), then my dad makes a fire in the fireplace, then we can open stockings, then my mom makes pancakes, then she has to do the dishes, then we can finally open presents under the tree. And scene.
The rest of our extended family – those same aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents – came over to our house later on Christmas Day for more eating and drinking and Jews-celebrating-Christmas-but-not-in-a-Jesus-way.
If Hanukkah happened to fall on Christmas Eve or Day, we might light a menorah, usually only if one of my aunts or their husbands brought their own menorah and candles with them and prompted us. Watching the wax drip slowly down the candles, I was both intensely curious and strangely uncomfortable.
Curious because it was somewhat foreign to me yet I wanted to understand more about how I, and my family, were connected to this ritual and holiday. I wanted to know about it, I wanted to be brought in, I wanted it to be my holiday also, I wanted to fit in with the rest of my family. Maybe I was greedy, to want Hanukkah in addition to a picture-perfect Christmas that my parents worked so hard to create for us. But I think it was more than that, deeper. Growing up at the store, I was so steeped in family history and in being a Summer that it felt dissonant not to be connected to being a Summer in this way as well.
Uncomfortable because, well, I had no idea what was going on. I didn’t know the story of Hanukkah, I didn’t know any of the prayers being said, I didn’t speak or understand Hebrew, I didn’t know how to light a menorah, I didn’t know how to spell “Hanukkah” (honestly, I still have to look that up most of the time).
Not knowing these things made me incredibly uncomfortable, but what was worse was that I felt like I should know. My aunts and uncles and cousins seemed to be well versed in all things Hanukkah, and I just stood there kind of pretending, kind of not pretending, mostly just feeling dumb and awkward. I wanted to melt like candle wax into the floor because here I was, the oldest of all my cousins, a straight-A student used to knowing pretty much everything (or so I thought), and I was clueless. I was an outsider. In my own family. And I was positive the rest of my family knew I was an outsider. I was always relieved when Hanukkah didn’t fall on Christmas and we didn’t have to even consider lighting a menorah.
When my son was born, I became more curious about the Jewish part of my identity, as it was also part of his. (My son’s father is half-Jewish in the same way I am, which I guess makes our son also technically half-Jewish but via a different route. Fractions, amirite?) I wanted him to feel like he belonged, and I wanted him to have a sense of his family identity.
Hence the dinosaur menorah. And the baby and kid Hanukkah books, stacked alongside our Christmas baby books. Eventually, I learned how to light a menorah (thank you, internet!), which my son and I do together every year while we talk about the story of Hanukkah (I finally learned this mostly from going to a holiday performance at my son’s preschool many years ago). Our menorah sits on a windowsill next to our Christmas tree, a beautiful, messy, agnostic tableau of our heritage. We make sugar cookies and rugelach. If there are any rugelach left by Christmas Eve, we leave some out for Santa – he is rather fond of the nutella ones.
Last year, the dinosaur menorah, spackled in years of wax drippings, was ruined in a fire in our basement storage unit, where I keep all of our holiday decorations. I got a new menorah, a cool, artsy one that fits my grown-up personal tastes, not one that looks like an extinct reptile (one of the best parts about kids getting older is reclaiming one’s living space from all the crap).
“What’s that?” my son said with a sneer as I unwrapped the menorah from its packaging.
“Our new menorah,” I said. “We had to replace Dino.”
“Aww, I like the dinosaur one better,” he said. “Can’t we get another dinosaur?”
I still feel like an impostor when I’m lighting the menorah. I still don’t know the prayer. But for my kid, the menorah is just as much a part of his childhood holiday tradition as our Christmas tree is. Maybe it’s not good enough, but it’s something.
And yes, I did order another dinosaur menorah.
What’s got my attention this week
The ‘90s Episode: Trying to Make Sense of a Magical Decade for Music podcast. So many gems here. Impossible to capture an entire decade in less than an hour, but where was Liz Phair? Although I was happy to hear Courtney Love and Hole get some props.
I’ve been thinking a lot about intergenerational friendships lately. I want to make room for more of those relationships.
Maybe we can do more to help boys, which would help everyone.
WAL woman of the week
A woman out there in the world, being A Lot
Young women are taking on the magic world – I loved this. (Side note: I wrote an article in 2008 for Bust magazine about female magicians and became pretty obsessed with the world of professional magic as a result.)
Out of the mouths of babes
From Neko Case in Oldster: “Being 52 has really shone a spotlight on how much of my life was wasted in the tractor beam of the male gaze. I mourn that loss of time and experience and freedom like mourning the passing of a loved one.”