Fern: Christmas is a holiday I see through the eyes of an outsider. Something my Jewish family never celebrated. Do you have good Christmas memories?
Joe: Some of them. My earliest Christmas memories are from my family’s first years in America. In the old country Christmas was strictly a religious holiday, but over here it was a different story.
My dad was very big on two fairly contradictory things: one, remember who you are, meaning the heritage, the language, the culture, of your birth; and two, learn the new culture and assimilate into it.
So there are multicolored Christmas lights in my memory of our apartment above my father’s grocery store. I am wearing a brand new cowboy hat and waving two brand new clickity tin pistols as I mosey past the radio in the front room. On the radio is a song about “decking the halls,” which, I remember being confused about. Surely it meant something to the Amerkains, but “fa la la la la la la?” Who talked like that?
Fern: I lived in a Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx but the public school celebrated Christmas with unbridled enthusiasm. Despite the fact that hardly any of the children at P.S. 95 had a Christmas tree at home, we cut and colored ornaments and made angels. One teacher had a decorated tree on a table in the back of the room and we placed her gifts there.
We sang carols with reverence: Fall to your knees. Oh, hear the angel voices. Oh, night divine, oh, night when Christ was born. Those songs are so much more beautiful than Jingle Bells.
We put on Christmas plays attended by our parents and old-country grandparents. Perhaps because in the 1950s, Jewish people desired a quiet assimilation after the horrors of a genocidal war, there were not any complaints that Christmas was a religious holiday — and certainly not ours.
I recall the pangs of tenderness I felt for the baby in a straw-filled manger surrounded by wise men who had schlepped so far to see him. To me, a little girl who would grow up to be a writer, the story of a baby born in a barn because no one would welcome his parents made for a compelling narrative.
Joe: So did you believe in Santa Claus?
Fern: I grew up in a very iconoclastic household. My mother, especially. She pretty much told the truth about everything. So there was no stork delivering babies. No tooth fairy. No Santa. Once my grandmother was going to take me to Macys to see Santa (why, I don’t know since I never got Christmas presents) and I had just seen a Santa at a different store. My mother said, “Well, the stores hire men to dress up in a Santa costume. There’s a lot of them.”
Joe: Did you feel bad about not celebrating Christmas? Excluded?
Fern: I don’t think I did. I felt grown-up actually. Especially about how babies were born and knowing that Santa wasn’t real. I liked being in on the real story.
Joe: My dad encouraged us to listen to the radio and go to movies, thinking that we’d absorb the culture that way. And Christmas, American style, was a part of that. So he bought us a tree—which none of us knew how to make stand up. My mother solved the problem by tying lengths of her knitting yarn to its scrawny top and half-suspending it from two corner window rods.
One early Christmas memory is of my brother and sister and I sitting around the kitchen table and trying not to giggle because the radio was singing about the Baby Jesus sleeping in heavenly pee.
But there were many Jewish families in our neighborhood in Toledo, Ohio. So I heard about Hanukah. I thought of it as Jewish Christmas.
Fern: It’s certainly turned into that today. But Hanukah is a fairly minor Jewish holiday. And –- true to form –- was barely celebrated by my family. My grandparents spoke Yiddish and kept Kosher. Our Jewishness was defined around food, language and humor.
On Hanukah we went to my grandparents’ apartment, where my brother and I were presented with foil-covered chocolate Hanukah gelt which we unwrapped and devoured on the spot.
There were no other gifts. As our family was leaving to go home, my grandmother would go to her pocketbook, slowly take out her coin purse and ceremoniously give my brother and I each a twenty dollar bill. “For Kolletch,” she said with her heavily inflected accent.
I held the bill in my hand for only seconds before it was confiscated by my father, who said the money would be put in the bank. Not until I was a teenager did I understand that “Kolletch” meant the place I was expected to go to after high school.
Joe: I think my most vivid Christmas memories aren’t from my own childhood, but that of my two daughters. When Katie was three I explained to her how Santa Claus was this old man with a big beard and how he slid down the chimney while we slept. She stepped back and her eyes widened with fear—and I realized I’d just described a home invasion.
As time went by she got used to the idea and soon she and her sister were helping me put cookies and milk out on Christmas Eve. After the girls were asleep I ate the most of the cookies and drank the milk, but what made them true believers was that I always spread a thin layer of fireplace ashes onto the hearth and used my snow boot to make a firm, clear impression of a footprint. That really capped it off. They beheld with their own eyes the actual print of Santa’s boot. I think they probably still half believe.
Fern: When my family moved from the Bronx to Long Island, land of ethnic Jews and Italians and generic Americans, everyone was white, but more “mixed” than the old neighborhood. My mother sold real estate, and December was a busy time. Jewish couples from the city drove around looking for a block with no Christmas lights: a “Jewish area.” The public schools still had Christmas concerts, but there was the recognition that the holiday was not celebrated by everyone.
Joe: Then how was it for you moving to Iowa? And having your first child here?
Fern: I remember Gabi home from kindergarten and announcing: “Mom, I am the only Hanukkah child in my whole class!” She seemed ok with that, although she wasn’t exactly sure what it meant. Of course, I was asked to go to school to explain to the class “the meaning of Hanukkah” — something my own irreligious parents had apparently neglected to teach me. I had some research to do.
Joe: I think my very fondest Christmas memory is from the first one the girls and I spent alone together after I was divorced. The girls were four and seven, and it was a week or so before Christmas. I’d given the girls their baths and sat them wrapped in bath towels in front of our black-and-white tv to watch Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Meanwhile I made popcorn using an old-fashioned popper over the fire in the fireplace. And that’s my fondest Christmas memory: they were fed, bathed and cozy, eating popcorn and watching Rudolph.
Fern: Nice memories, Christmas is good for that, I suppose, but to tell you the truth, I’m relieved to have a free pass not to participate.
Joe: Yeah, you get a kick out of acting the Grinch.
Fern: Oh, look how many people complain about the pressures of getting ready for Christmas, the depression that affects so many around the holiday. “Not my holiday,” is kind of relief. I do like the egg nog, though.
Joe: After we were married and bringing the girls up together you got into having a tree, shopping, wrapping presents, the whole schmeer. You were enjoying more than just the egg nog.
Fern: Once the girls were grown and we were moving into our new, smaller house, one of the first things to go into the dumpster was that old artificial tree you put together each year.
Joe: Since then, not so much as a sprig of holly. Fa la la la la.
Fern: So, my question for you is: Do you miss not celebrating, by living with me?
Joe: Not for a minute. I’m not religious, so what am I missing? Scrooge might have been on to something.
Fern: Christians may lament the secularization of Christmas, but strangely, I do as well. The Christmas season of my childhood was a time of poignancy and wonder — even for a little Jewish girl whose parents were free-thinkers and whose grandparents gave her only expectations.
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This resonated so much with me, as a Jewish person who grew up in Iowa: "I felt grown-up actually. Especially about how babies were born and knowing that Santa wasn’t real. I liked being in on the real story."
I have a very vivid memory of my older sister explaining to me when I was about 3 1/2 that we know Santa Claus isn't real, but we can't tell any of our non-Jewish friends, because we don't want to ruin it for them.
I also remember learning religious Christmas carols in public school. In my day (this would have been the 1970s), no one complained but the music teacher did include one token Chanukah song (the worst one, about the dreidel!).
Love your back and forth and all the memories! Fern, after living in NYC for many years and a first marriage into a Jewish family, I appreciate this greatly. Generally Iowans have only one lens through which to view this time of year.