DADWAGON

For the moment, I’m a lucky bastard. Sasha is only 2 years old, and can’t fully distinguish red from green, let alone understand what a holiday is, and why we would or wouldn’t be celebrating it. But the Christmas/Hanukkah dilemma has been an issue in our household for many years already, and will likely never be fully resolved.

Let’s start with my wife. Jean is a Buddhist, which means she likes to decorate with electric lights and shiny objects. Christmas provides an excellent opportunity for decorating with electric lights and shiny objects. Why, she asks, can’t we have a Christmas tree?

Because, I like to say, it’s just not my holiday. As a Jew, I just can’t countenance the encroachment of this Christian holiday on my life. I’ve dealt with that crap enough already (three years as the only Chosen Person in my Southern high school), and I don’t want to give the Christians another goddamn inch. In fact, the first and only time I ever decorated a Christmas tree was in 2003, in Delhi, India, at the home of wealthy Hindus—possibly the only religion more addicted to shiny electrical decorations than Buddhists.

So: Fuck Christmas. Yeah, Bill O’Reilly, you heard me. You want a war? You got one!

Does this mean we do Hanukkah in my house? Well, therein lies the real dilemma. Because in addition to being a Jew, I’m also an atheist, disparaging of anything and everything to do with god and religion, organized or otherwise. Jewish beliefs are just about as ridiculous to me as Christian and Muslim ones, and I’ll be damned if my daughter is going to grow up superstitious. (Actually, I’ll probably be damned anyway.) My parents, and probably a lot of desperate secular Jews, would argue that I can bring her up as a “cultural Jew” who follows the traditions but eschews the mysticism. But I think we human beings would all be better off acknowledging that religion was a big mistake and that the traditions should be allowed to die out—especially Hanukkah, whose story many now view as the triumph of traditionalist, anti-Greek (hence anti-modernity) Jews over progressive secular forces.

So, naturally, as you might expect, we do a Hanukkah dinner in my house every year. With a menorah that’s been in our family for decades, excellent latkes, the whole shebang. Partly, of course, this is just an excuse for me to cook a big, delicious meal. Partly, it’s to counteract the sway of Christmas, to remind Jean, and someday Sasha, that that is not our holiday!

That “someday” is important, because eventually, in a year or two or three, Sasha is going to come to expect PRESENTS. And we’ll have to come up with an excuse to give them to her. She might even demand a tree. And so this is the plan: We will give Sasha her presents on the Thursday before school vacation begins, which gives her just enough time to open them, bring them to school, show them to her friends, and lose them on the way home.

And we will have a tree! A CHINESE TREE! It will be a small, indoor tangerine tree in a pot, and we will festoon it with hong bao (red envelopes) and maybe some light-up chili peppers. And on Christmas Day, we’ll do what Jews have done for generations: Order kungpao shrimp and mooshoo pork, and take in a movie. That’s the kind of secular sacrilege I could really get behind—if only it weren’t so Jewish.

So I was walking JP home from his mother’s last night, and as is his usual pattern, he was trying to hit me up for a toy at each gumball machine we passed. He gets his way with this about once a week, which is a pretty high ratio, I think. Last night was a no night, which led to a discussion about why he never gets gifts (he does), when said gifts will arrive (I made the mistake of saying he had to wait for Hanukkah, when gifts would rain from the sky), which opened the door to a further discussion about how come we don’t have a Christmas tree like he does at his mother’s, which required me to explain that we do Hanukkah at my house, with its fun candles and stuff, which ended up in … a blank stare.

Don’t get me wrong—JP likes lighting things on fire as much as the next kid, and he knows that eight days of gifts is better than one. But he really has no idea what Hanukkah is, which makes sense, as I really have no idea what it is, other than the time of year where we have to make lame rationalizations about the pleasures of lighting things on fire and the surplus benefits of eight days of gifts while the entire country goes apeshit over a pagan demigod breaking into their fucking homes and stealing their cookies.

Problem solved! Fuck the goyim and their silly holidays of commercial excess. I’m going to stick with my potato pancakes and world-weary ethnic bitterness. It’s better that way. I will know where the finer Chinese restaurants are, and the Christians will have to make due with candy canes.

The real issue, though, is that JP will be learning about Xmas over at his mother’s house, and let’s be honest—Hanukkah can’t really compete. Christmas is too much, it’s too popular, too successful—it’s the Grinch that stole my Jewish Christmas. I can try to ignore it, but what good will it do? There’s lights everywhere! Before Halloween is even over!

Do I want, then, to actively undermine Christmas in JP’s mind? Do I tell him that Santa is not only not real but a little bit of a perv? And a drunk? And that the reindeer get nothing in the whole deal? Or do I do what divorced parents always have to do—accept that things don’t work perfectly, do the best I can, and make sure we have a good time anyway.

What do you think?