by Burt Siegel, JSPAN Board member
Most of us have, at one time or another, struggled with what has sometimes been called the "Christmas dilemma", meaning: what is a Jew supposed to do about Christmas? As late as the 1950s, a surprisingly high number of even endogenous Jewish households had Christmas trees. (Sometimes, in an attempt at embarrassed humor they were referred to as "Chanukah bushes.") Today, other than in religiously mixed households, that phenomenon is rare.
Nor do very many Jewish children still get visits from Santa. In the interest of full disclosure, however, I must admit that he did make one stop at my house in 1948 or '49. My older sister, killjoy that she was, pointed out that it would have been physically impossible for him to have made it to every house, even in a place as small as Bayonne, NJ, from sundown to sunrise. To be honest, by the age of 5 or 6, I had figured this out myself. I didn't tell my parents though, because I didn't want to kill a good thing, but for some reason, Santa never made a repeat appearance.
More observant families, for the most part, even prevented their children from trick or treating, or dressing up in a costume on Halloween. When my oldest daughter was in a Jewish day school in the 1970s, she was told that she had to ignore Halloween because it was a Christian holiday. This led to her to tell a bewildered Christian playmate that she couldn't go around the neighborhood collecting candy with her because the holiday had "something to do with Jesus." Of course fundamentalist Christians don't let their children participate in the Halloween merriment either, because the holiday is "pagan." As my Bubbie would say, "go figure."
Thanksgiving was always a free pass, I thought. We could really throw ourselves into this one without a modicum of guilt. While I know that none of the Jewish kids I grew up with in the late '40s and early '50s would have been comfortable playing wise men in the PS # 3 school play, ( we even had a baby Jesus,) being chosen to be a Pilgrim was real "yicchus." I never got that part though; I played an Indian, an inferior role in those pre-PC days.
by Burt Siegel, JSPAN Board member
Most of us have, at one time or another, struggled with what has sometimes been called the "Christmas dilemma", meaning: what is a Jew supposed to do about Christmas? As late as the 1950s, a surprisingly high number of even endogenous Jewish households had Christmas trees. (Sometimes, in an attempt at embarrassed humor they were referred to as "Chanukah bushes.") Today, other than in religiously mixed households, that phenomenon is rare.
Nor do very many Jewish children still get visits from Santa. In the interest of full disclosure, however, I must admit that he did make one stop at my house in 1948 or '49. My older sister, killjoy that she was, pointed out that it would have been physically impossible for him to have made it to every house, even in a place as small as Bayonne, NJ, from sundown to sunrise. To be honest, by the age of 5 or 6, I had figured this out myself. I didn't tell my parents though, because I didn't want to kill a good thing, but for some reason, Santa never made a repeat appearance.
More observant families, for the most part, even prevented their children from trick or treating, or dressing up in a costume on Halloween. When my oldest daughter was in a Jewish day school in the 1970s, she was told that she had to ignore Halloween because it was a Christian holiday. This led to her to tell a bewildered Christian playmate that she couldn't go around the neighborhood collecting candy with her because the holiday had "something to do with Jesus." Of course fundamentalist Christians don't let their children participate in the Halloween merriment either, because the holiday is "pagan." As my Bubbie would say, "go figure."
Thanksgiving was always a free pass, I thought. We could really throw ourselves into this one without a modicum of guilt. While I know that none of the Jewish kids I grew up with in the late '40s and early '50s would have been comfortable playing wise men in the PS # 3 school play, ( we even had a baby Jesus,) being chosen to be a Pilgrim was real "yicchus." I never got that part though; I played an Indian, an inferior role in those pre-PC days.