Confession time: I just don’t understand Christmas. I simply cannot comprehend the depths of people’s feelings about Christmas. Sure, Christmas music is fun, the trees and lights are pretty, and anyone who knows me knows I love a good gingerbread cookie but I don’t think I will ever truly understand people’s excitement for Christmas.
I think my position is understandable. This Jew doesn’t actually celebrate Christmas (although we did have a Christmas tree a few times when I was younger in the spirit of holiday inclusion and experience). Living anywhere in America means growing up with mostly people who celebrate Christmas, and so I mostly Christmas-ed by association. To most Jewish families, Hanukkah really isn’t that big of a deal, and while there are other exciting Jewish holidays, none of them really manage to get up to the scale with which Christmas is celebrated in a lot of homes.
When I was in middle and high school I had a friend whose family did Christmas big. Every year I would see my friend cheerfully putting up decorations, go with her to buy gifts for her family, and come over a few days later to inspect the literal mountain of presents her family had bestowed upon each other. The way they did Christmas was intense, so much stock was placed on the amount and quality of the gifts that from middle school to high school I would just follow my friend around the mall on the weekends leading up to Christmas listening to her stress about what she was getting each member of her family and “did I think it was enough?”
I was obviously the wrong person to ask. I had no frame of reference at all for this kind of endless gift giving. Hanukkah is really not that big of a deal and after my siblings and I grew out of being little kids. My parents usually give us little things, or just plainly ask us if there was anything that’d we needed. Not that my parents aren't generous, it’s just that if anything they’re generous over the course of the year, not specifically during the holiday season. It’s actually not traditional to give gifts during Hanukkah, but since Christmas has been thoroughly commercialized it’s only natural that Hanukkah is too.
But it’s not that fact that I’m not receiving a mountain of presents or not getting to put lights on a small indoor tree, I could do that if I felt inclined, but it’s really the pure excitement I can’t tune into. The minute Thanksgiving is over a switch is flipped and those who enjoy celebrating Christmas really start to let you know. It’s that kind of excitement, the kind of inherent inevitable excitement that Christmas seems to bring to people that I don’t really understand.
I like the holidays, love a Dolly Parton Christmas album, and like any rational human being think that eggnog is disgusting. I like driving around the see Christmas lights and I love giving presents, but I’ll be spending Christmas day like any good Jew: eating mountains of Chinese food.
