It’s Christmas Envy time again. I know over the years I’ve complained about how left out I felt as a kid, how on Christmas morning everyone in the neighborhood would rush outside and practically scream, “Whatja get, whatja get?” and how being Jewish made me different and stammer and sometimes make something up, like “ice skates” or “a sled” or “a piece of jewelry.” But where were my shiny new ice skates, my cool American Flyer, my silver-plated charm bracelet? Only in my imagination.
The poor rabbis tried to equate Chanukah, a minor holiday, to Christmas, worrying that Jews might start dropping like assimilated flies into some generic religious oblivion. But, I ask you, how could I resist? You tell me what is more beautiful than an eight-foot Christmas tree with tinsel dripping and lights glittering and a golden angel at the top? (A golden angel from your great-grandmother, I might add.) The menorah just couldn’t compete.
Meanwhile, while I was complaining about how hard life was without the romantic beauty of Christmas, my Gentile friends were complaining about how material the holiday had gotten, how the spiritual and the religious meaning had been buried under tons of ripped wrapping paper and premade bows, only to be thrown into the garbage bins three hours after the frenzied ripping ritual.
My argument was always the same: I wouldn’t do it as a frenzied ritual. I would love the hours of shopping and the time I would put into the creativity of picking out something special for each person I loved and then wrapping each gift differently. And how it would feel to watch them open and savor, and then that feeling of gratitude. And we would sit around in our matching pajamas having hot cider.
If you could have heard my friends’ responses, you would have had a good laugh. “Nance, you are watching too much Fifties television. And no one had the Norman Rockwell Christmas you think we were all having, and no, Nance, we’re exhausted and it’s not fun, and it’s crazy and it’s expensive and it’s out of control, and it’s too damn much.”
I did have one absolutely beautiful Christmas, in 1963. I was living in San Diego. My friends took me to midnight Mass. They loaned me a lacy black mantilla, and we walked to church under twinkling stars with bunches of other families with tons of little kids. And then there was that intoxicating smell of the incense and the votive candles sparkling and the building itself, high, high ceilings with the magnificent sound of “O Come, All Ye Faithful.”
And then we came home and ate the homemade tamales that had been steaming in a Crock-Pot since early morning. I thought I had died and gone to heaven. I wasn’t the envious 10-year-old girl who needed toys like the other kids. This time I was a 22-year-old young woman with the same Christmas Envy, only now it was my grown-up version.
My son was married to a gal who wasn’t Jewish, and I did have Christmas for a while. I finally had a tree to decorate. I shopped till I dropped. I bought ribbon candy. I wrapped gifts and placed them with so much reverence you would have thought I had gone to the North Pole personally for my purchases. It was fun. It really was. But it was too late. It didn’t scratch the Christmas Envy itch. It didn’t heal the childhood wound of being other.
About seven years ago, when my son’s new partner’s kids were curious about our holidays, I was so excited to share my tradition. Ordinarily, I would just bring the menorah down from its full year of hibernation, and after the week was over, place it back on its shelf till next December. But this time I cleaned off the melted colored wax, shined the brass, bought little things for my new grandchildren, and got to tell them the story of the miracle of the oil lasting eight days and eight nights. And together we lit the candles, and I thought about my ancestors.
Now I’m an 83-year-old with just a memory of my old Christmas Envy. Because when you’re this old, you don’t want to buy junk, you don’t want to waste paper, you don’t want to support Amazon, and you don’t want to give stuff just to be giving stuff. What you do want is to use every minute in genuine gratitude, no matter where you find it, just as long as you remember to find it.
And you start to wish everyone a merry absolutely everything. But most important, you want to make sure no one ever feels like the other. Turns out that’s the spirit of Christmas and Chanukah in the first place.