“It is winter in Narnia,” said Mr. Tumnus, “and has been for ever so long…always winter, but never Christmas.” You are probably familiar with this line, or at least the concept, from the book The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis. I’m not sure about you, but when I first heard this line, I didn’t really see an issue with not having Christmas. Endless winter does sound pretty awful, but I could definitely do without non-stop advertisements for luxury vehicles somehow centered around the holiday, and Old Navy matching jammies commercials repeating every five minutes. Of course, I understand and respect that people who celebrate enjoy the holiday, and my experience with it is limited to its commercial aspects, which are bound to be vapid and uninspiring.
Since there’s a bit of a space between my first two children and my youngest, I had forgotten that around age 3, Jewish kids learn about Christmas and become somewhat enamored by it. My youngest recently had their car seat turned from rear-facing to front-facing, and had been enjoying the new view. The fall season offered plenty of opportunities to see the decorations people placed outside, even if several of the displays were kind of scary.
Just as soon as we noticed that the Halloween decorations were being put away, new decorations started coming out: Christmas lights, blow-up Santas, green and red everything. Within a week, I was hearing, “Ima, do you know Christmas? Yeah, it’s so fun!”
I am never going to tell my child that Christmas is not fun, or that Chanukah is the Jewish Christmas. However, I did dig in a little bit to find out what they thought Christmas was, because they attend a Jewish preschool and to my knowledge, unless a streaming episode had autoplayed, I didn’t think they had experience with it.
When I asked, they started talking about winter activities – snowballs, sledding, ice skating. It turns out that they thought winter was Christmas. I was able to explain that winter is a season when we do those activities, and yes, they are so fun! Christmas is a holiday that some people celebrate during the season of winter. We don’t celebrate Christmas, but we do have a holiday that we celebrate during winter, and it’s called Hanukkah.
We have lots of traditions during Hanukkah, and my older kids have started to count on them every year. Admittedly, a lot of them center around food! We light the menorah each night and have them sit for a bit to enjoy the light. We have dinner together, making latkes on a few of the eight nights. I make homemade sufganiyot – in my opinion, it’s the only way to get them the way I want them. We play dreidel and have gelt.
And, of course, we talk about the Hanukkah story, the importance of staying true to our Judaism, and what assimilation means. Living in the United States, where Christian holidays are overemphasized in the media and shown as being beautiful, perfect days where children are given all the things they’ve ever wished for, it’s really not possible for Jewish families to create holiday experiences that match what our kids see on TV. However, it is possible for us to create beautiful, fun experiences for our children that emphasize the uniqueness of being Jewish and make them conscious consumers of media so they know that what they see on TV is meant to sell stuff and that no one really has an experience like that on Dec. 25. My children have names that center around the Maccabees, and as a set of three boys (until/unless we are told otherwise), my husband and I like to highlight how they can accomplish great things when they work together.
As my kids get a little older, they have made suggestions for how they would like to celebrate the holiday, too. We live in a neighborhood with many Jewish families, and have sometimes taken walks just after candle lighting time to appreciate the glow of chanukiyot in so many windows. Seeing the consistency of celebrating the miracle – and bringing more light into our world – is truly beautiful. I feel more connected to my neighbors and am occasionally surprised to see a house with a menorah, where I didn’t previously know the family in the home was Jewish. At Hanukkah2, it seems, many of us remember the importance of our Jewish roots and find reason to shine more of our light into the world.
In a world where we are increasingly longing for precedented times, and the external milieu can feel like eternal winter, I’m grateful to have opportunities to bring, share, and see the light in this long winter. For this moment, that is the great miracle happening here.
