Writing: Articles & Essays

No More Hanukkah Bush

The Jewish Review, December 15, 2005

When I was growing up in Little Neck, Queens, my family was the weird family on the street – the artists – whose yard overflowed with stolen bricks from Manhattan demolition sites, a churning cement mixer, a litter of mixed breed puppies. And the fact that we had a Christmas tree, even though we were Jewish, made us even weirder.

"Why do you have one of those?" my Jewish friends asked when they glimpsed the lit pine in our living room. I joked it was a Hanukkah bush. But I didn't know why we had one either. It must have looked strange to my Christian friends too with the Mexican folk art ornaments and the aluminum foil Star of David on the top.

I didn't know any other Jewish family who had a tree. But what no one knew and what was most astounding about our peculiar Christmas was that it was the happiest day of the year in our family. The rest of the year, my parents whirled with constant activity: making pottery, finishing murals, knocking walls down for our endless home renovation projects and hosting a never ending stream of visitors. Some stayed the night, some stayed for months.

My friends wanted to live at my house because we slept on the floor. A neighbor said he envied our overflowing fruit bowls. Acquaintances said I was lucky to live in a house that was so colorful and free.

But what might have seemed a charming frenzy from the outside was too crowded with guests and projects for me as a kid. I yearned for more time, focused on me, from my whirling dervish of a mother. But she never sat down. Except on Christmas, when everything stopped.

In the morning we opened a mountain of presents – most wrapped in newspaper because you didn't buy wrapping paper – that was too bourgeois. We wrapped everything from toothbrushes to toilet paper and some real gifts too. We ate lox and bagels and went to the movies in the afternoon.

On that day we weren't Jewish and we weren't Christian, we just were. The day seemed to last forever.

As it turns out, my Jewish husband grew up with a tree too. His parents emigrated from Siberia after World War II and ran a small clothing store in Los Angeles. For their holidays they placed an aluminum tree in the shop window, for the customers I guess. But on Christmas Eve they unscrewed the branches from the silver pole, piled them in the trunk of the car and drove that tree home.

Neither my husband nor I grew up in an observant Jewish home. At my house, we celebrated a night of Hanukkah and an occasional Passover Seder. But when I started my own family I was living in Oregon and by then longing from the Jewish neighborhoods of my East Coast childhood. Living here, in the Christmas tree capital of the world, Judaism called to me. I joined a temple, a radical act in my bohemian family.

Now, as a practicing Jew, I can't have a Christmas tree in my living room. Because it's not my holiday. It never was.

So this year, when the first night of Hanukkah falls on Christmas Day, we won't have a tree, and of course my eight-year-old daughter wants one. I have yet to admit to her that both her parents had a tree.

Instead I'll do what most parents do – strive to give my daughter the things I missed as a kid. So, in place of a tree once a year, we, as a family, will slow down together many times during the year and celebrate the holidays that are our own.

As for those Christmases of my childhood? They taught me how important it is to come together in one big circle and take the day off.