Happy HANUKKAH and a Very Merry CHRISTMAS

 I have no issue with those who insist that only "Happy Holidays" is the way to greet people whose observances are unknown to the greeter. 

But I have more affinity with those who are less sensitive, and (like me) appreciate the majority including the various minorities in their greetings.  We are Hanukkah people, but if you wish me a Merry Christmas, brothers and sisters-- I'm happy to be joyous with you in your merriment.

I choose not to feel conquered, excluded, or imposed on. Your happiness is a blessing, and I am only glad to share it.

And in years such as this one, we get to dance together, because as happens every few years, the calendars decided your holidays and ours overlap.

AFTER CHRISTMAS and BEFORE NEW YEAR'S

Harking back to days when I gifted and was gifted holiday gifts, (now a minor part of my holiday season) I remember the day after Christmas as the day the stores were crowded with folks returning gifts.

 

It’s a strange phenomenon, this “thanks for the thought but I’d rather have something else” that sweeps the land.

 

But it is what it is. Just try to remember that the thought that went into choosing something for you is the sweet part, not the actual “something.”

 

And let’s have fun before we take a collective breath and exhale a solemn wish for a better and more peaceful year to come.

SOME SANTAS ARE JEWISH

 

Yes, Virginia, I’ve seen it with my own eyes

When DS was in preschool, one of my mothers’-support group friends related a scandal in her daughter’s pre-school. Like us, my friend’s family is Jewish. Unlike us, who sent our kids to a Jewish pre-school, Christian families were the majority in her daughter’s school.

Shortly after Christmas one of the kids asked her daughter what Santa had given her. The three-year-old gave an answer, which set the stage to a scandalous reaction.

 

“We’re Jewish,” she said. “We get presents from real people.”

 

Other parents wanted my friend to teach her daughter that it was not okay to infer that Santa isn’t a real person, and do it ASAP.

 

The thing is— Santa is real if you dig deeper.

Santa Claus, the giver of presents to bring joy to children on the darkest days of the year, is an idea. As such, it is real. But abstractions are beyond children’s literal thinking and so various individuals dressed in red, and donning floppy red hats with white pompoms, have taken to manifest the spirit of gift-giving on this one particular day.

 

Some years later, our next-door neighbors, a Norwegian family, asked if their friend could come over to our house on Christmas Eve and dress up in the Santa outfit so he can make the appearance for their twin daughters, then barely a year old. As he’d be coming straight from work, they needed a place for him to get into the outfit. Of course, we said yes. They left his outfit and a sack full of presents for their twins at our house. Our kids, by then teens, found the whole thing rather funny. It hadn’t been part of their childhood.

 

When the friend showed up, he was so drunk I had to help him wiggle into the outfit and catch him so he wouldn’t fall down while doing so. He needed help at every step. I lit his way to the neighbors’ door, holding my breath so he not collapse on the sidewalk. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw their door open and their arranged-for Santa waddle inside.

 

The next year, our neighbors asked if our son, by then in first year of college, would do the favor of being their Santa. “Last year didn’t go too well,” they said. Apparently, they had no other friends who would volunteer.

 

I asked DS, and he said he’d do it. It would be like a fun acting gig. The day after, our neighbors told me they had never had such a great Santa. Apparently, DS prepared Norwegian sentences to utter in an altered “Ho-Ho-Ho” voice, and his whole act was so hilariously memorable that as far as they were concerned he has the volunteer job for life. This Jewish Santa was the real deal.

And he did indeed materialized the spirit of Santa Claus for the next few years. The year he went to graduate school in Paris, the neighbors were bereft that he would not be there for their yearly tradition. By the time he returned from France, the twins no longer needed this concretization of holiday spirit. Santa now came in their own gift giving and receiving, no red hat and white cotton wool beard needed.

 

But I can attest at least one Santa was Jewish. I have the picture to prove it.

Please, no humbugs, folks. May the joy of gift giving and receiving be with you the whole yearlong.

Generosity and blessings

for the

👉New Year👈

HAPPY HOLIDAYS (?)

 

This week is “Happy Holidays” greeting time. Everywhere I go, this is part of casual exchanges.

    Regardless of which holidays, these words cover all. But do they?

    Seems like an obligation to be happy. With such an obligation, comes guilt if we can’t.

There are lots of reasons to encourage gratefulness, wish better health, and let others know you value them. I’m less sure about happiness; that thing we so casually spew out as a wish or even half a command. I’m actually not sure what it is.

 

My mulling is much less about whether it’s okay to say Merry Christmas to people who may not be Christians (its fine with me, but this is no longer a universally accepted notion) than about feeling I wish I had something else I could put out to casual passersby.

 

There is the “stay safe” I’ve had my fill of hearing. One friend replaced that with “stay sane,” which I like much more. I almost want to substitute STAY SANE for the happy holidays utterances, except...

©Kristen Feighery

...except that doing so with strangers will likely be taken as a sign of insanity.

But you here know what I mean. Stay sane, everybody. Happiness is a blessing but not an obligation. 

Exotic Christmas?

 

Christmas lights all around.

 

I have two close friends who, like me, are Jewish. Unlike me, they feel “excluded” at the sights and sounds of Christmas.

We’re the kind of Jews who don’t do “Hanukkah Bushes.” I’ve been guilty in the past of overdoing Hanukkah presents for my kids instead of Hanukkah Gelt, the traditional giving of money without fancy wrapping.

 

I now relish the modesty and wistfulness of our holiday of winter lights with a single Hanukah menorah and something fried.

My two friends grew up in a Christmas majority culture. I had the advantage of having grown up where Hanukkah was at home as well as on the streets, and Christmas was something you had to seek if you wanted to spot any of it in certain quarters.

Hanukkah was commonplace; Christmas was exotic.

For me, It still is, . I’m delighted looking at this celebration of lights, plethora of glistening wrappings under trees, music that mixes old beauty with some sappiness, and lots of people trying hard to look cheerful in colorful sweaters.

Unlike my two friends, I’m very comfortable being an outsider looking in. Christmas is exotic, still.

No need to say Happy Holidays to me. Your Merry Christmas is welcome. I’ll say it right back to you, and mean it.

Celebrate!

Christmas & New Year’s Around the Corner...

 

How are this year’s holidays different for you?

Nearing the end of a calendar year, the inevitable lists come out: best movies of 2020, most memorable images of 2020, most memorable people of 2020, and so on.

What is certain is that this year had such momentous events, those who survived them can attest that the year twenty-twenty was different.

I am recalling a certain week at the end of August, where a record heat combined with freak dry lightning caused fifteen hundred wild fires in northern California alone. The air was seriously unhealthy, in addition to the masks we wore for a pandemic that had kept us sheltering in place for over five months. Between the pandemic and the fires, family members lost their homes and jobs.

Then, in just one week (that same end of August) both Facebook, Blogger and my website host— decided they were done with their old formats and forced a conversion to a new one. The latter seems so trivial compare the existential challenges all around. But the confluence of the *all of it* nearly broke this camel’s back. It’s hard to try to build a website and adjust to new screens (when most of life has moved to screens) as you literally can’t take a deep breath.

And just then, I had one of those illuminations: I realized I and most around me were more alive than we’d been. As the mounting challenges pressed, we were awakened. From then on, days felt blessed rather than cursed.

 

I hope the coming holidays are the same for you. When listing the year’s personal highlights, may you see how very blessed the year twenty-twenty has been.

©Silent Night by Shelagh Duffett

(Passed away June 24^th  2020)

Christmas Blessings

~To all everywhere who celebrate~ 

I wish you a warm and 

merry Christmas