Sukkot is one of my favorite Jewish Holidays, and it is wonderful and fun for kids.  You get to build a club house and decorate it with all of your awesome art and crayon creations. You can eat, play, and sing in it, and, if you are lucky, camp out under the stars.

From a farmer’s perspective, the holiday makes lots of sense.  Sukkot falls during the peak of the fall harvest. I find it very natural to feel a direct connection to our ancestors who built sukkot long ago. And from a mother’s perspective,  shifting meals outside is a welcome relief because there is no need to pick up all of the crumbs that fall to the ground.

Sounds a little too perfect, right? What’s the catch?  For us, it’s a bit unusual.  Over the past year, my 4-year-old has shown his first real signs of Christmas envy.  Every once in a while, he will start wistfully talking about candy canes, ornaments, and, of course, Christmas trees. (His main exposure has been friends talking about it at preschool, and the glimmering trees we have stumbled upon here and there.)

Whenever he talks longingly about Christmas, it sends me into a bit of a panic. How will we manage to impart a solid, joyful Jewish identity to our children, with all of its complexity, hard questions, and devastating history — when shimmery, happy, easy going Christmas seems to be hidden around every corner?

In the midst of one somewhat desperate Jewish sales pitch, I  recently found myself saying that during Sukkot, we get to decorate an entire hut–not just one tree.

“You mean with pretty lights and candy canes?” He asked. “That’s one way to decorate,” I said.

We’re in the process of building our sukkah now. All of the pieces from the branches for the frame to the corn stalks on top will come from our farm.  And once it is built, it will be time to decorate.

I am not sure I will be able to find candy canes this time of year (plus I don’t allow my children to eat artificial colors), but I think I will look for some healthy, natural treats to hang from the ceiling.  And if we make some decorations, I guess we can call them sukkah ornaments, because technically they are.

I’m doing my best to make sure that my children have a fun Sukkot this year.  Come Christmas time, we’ll hopefully remember how we played, sang, danced, ate treats, and even got to build and decorate an entire sukkah.

Photo: Aaron_M

• Posted in Parenting, Traditions
• Tags: Christmas, featured, sukkah, sukkot

Once, while stoned out of my mind while taking a break from studying for finals during college, I took an online Enneagram test.

(An Enneagram test, like the ubiquitous Myers-Briggs (Briggs-Myers?) is a pseudo-scientific personality discovery tool thingy that essentially tells you nothing you don’t already know while also giving you incredible insight into the inner-workings of your psyche.)

But college is nothing if not a time for a little, ahem, self-discovery. So, I put down the bong and clicked my way through a series of questions.

Big Surprise. I scored high on Type 4, the Individualist, or, as B. likes to call it, the “Tortured Pain in the Ass Artist.”

As such, I like to be different. Always. (“Really? we had no idea!” I hear you cry.)

From extended breastfeeding, to strutting around in high heel hooker boots through the corn fields on a kibbutz, to cursing on the internet like a trucker on crunk–and alienating future prospective employers (I’ve googled myself–I know it ain’t pretty) in the process–I’ve enjoyed doing things that make me stand out.

As Green Day so eloquently put it, “I want to be a minority…”

And luckily, by birth right, I am a minority: I’m Jewish.

While living in the United States, I reveled in my Jewishness because it made me different. Yes, even in LA, where you can float away on a sea of yarmulkes down Fairfax Avenue… Still.

The “Holidays”–and I use that term loosely because let’s be real: Jinglebells, Santa Claus, and red and green everythings have nothing to do with Hanukkah or the fight for independence from the Assyrian army 200 years before the Common Era – has traditionally been a time when I would assert my Jewish independence from the Christmas caroling majority. Read the rest of this entry →

• Posted in Parenting, Traditions
• Tags: Christmas

In case you live in a cave and haven’t come out to hear the muzak, tomorrow is Christmas. And Christmas means one thing here at Kveller–office closed!

So to all of our readers–those of you traveling, those of you blissfully staying home, and those of you eating Chinese food, we wish you a happy holidays and–this year, a Shabbat shalom.

• Posted in Parenting, Traditions
• Tags: Christmas

Just one of the reasons I could never celebrate Christmas.

Being an American Jew at Christmas-time is not easy. With all due respect to those who celebrate Christmas, for those of us who do not, the flood of Christmas-themed advertisements, commercials, movies, TV specials and incessant Christmas muzak can be pretty overwhelming.

To make matters worse, I have in-laws who partake in Christmas in a BIG way.  My husband converted to Judaism before we got married. He grew up celebrating an “American” Church-less, Jesus-less, religion-less version of Christmas: a decorated tree, a big dinner, and watching football and parades on TV while munching on crackers and those weird cheese balls that have been rolled in chopped pecans. (I could never pass as a gentile–those cheese balls freak me out.)

My husband’s parents have been divorced for about 15 years, and my Mormon-raised mother-in-law gave up Christmas in bits and pieces over the years, eliminating it completely once she decided to convert to Judaism three years ago (that’s a whole other story!). My Baptist-bred father-in-law and his current wife celebrate Christmas enthusiastically in a non-religious way, much as my husband was raised celebrating it. Their home is decorated top to bottom with hundreds of pretty twinkling lights, an impressive collection of Santa snow globes and ornaments brought out of storage for the month of December, awesome blinking Star Trek ornaments adorning a gorgeous, fragrant tree, and hand bedazzled Christmas tablecloths and napkins.

I am tickled to admit I even once saw Santa Claus toilet paper in their guest bathroom during the holidays.

I will not lie and tell you that it was initially easy to celebrate their holiday with them. I was unfamiliar with the customs of Christmas. I call December 24 “erev Christmas” for my own clarity. I did not grow up in a family that showered me with gifts for the holidays, and the extensive gift-giving that goes on at my in-laws’ initially startled me. I felt like the most Jewishy Jew on the planet those first years at my in-laws’. Think Woody Allen imagining himself as the Hasid in “Annie Hall.” I felt like that.

Once my husband and I had children, my in-laws were thrilled and excited to buy our boys gifts at Christmas time. Of course, they love the presents they get, but I initially worried that they would see Christmas as “better” than Hanukkah and thus, ultimately lead to their rejection of Judaism (and me). I also worried that my in-laws would see me as ungrateful or as a “Scrooge” if I asked them to tone down the gift-giving.

My husband and I struggled with the gift issue ad nauseum: should we give them gifts for their holiday or ours? What wrapping paper does one choose?! My husband decided that the spirit of the holidays should be the giving, so he holds that we give his father Hanukkah gifts in Hanukkah wrapping to show the spirit of our holiday, and accept their Christmas gifts in Christmas wrapping with no reciprocation, since it’s their holiday.

I don’t know that I am entirely comfortable with this arrangement, especially since Hanukkah floats about the calendar erratically, sometimes causing me to send gifts by mail at the end of November or even after Christmas, despite the fact that we travel to see them at Christmas time and it would save me postage to just give them their darn gifts then!

A lot of my early anxiety I can now identify as protective paranoia, and I have found that presenting Judaism to our children is enjoyable, rewarding, and effortless, even in the face of tempting things like lots of presents. There are Jews who observe Christmas without the religious aspects it was designed to honor, and if it works for them, that’s fine. For us, what works is consistently emphasizing our ethnic and religious identity as different from those who celebrate Christmas, even if those people happen to be your grandparents. What we tell our older son is that Grandma and Grandpa celebrate Christmas but we don’t. Period. We don’t say that they are wrong, or that we are right, we just say that this is how it is in our family.

For now, our son loves getting presents at Christmas, but he loves it in the context of Grandma and Grandpa’s house. He does not identify as celebrating Christmas and I am telling you now: he will tell your child that Santa isn’t real, so keep clear of him if you hold that myth dear to your heart.

What works for us is being honest with our boys, being engaged in the lives of all of our family as much as we can be, and being ultimately grateful for the abundance of love and affection that we are blessed to have, especially in a nation and a world where many go without fresh water, food, or shelter, much less an intact home with healthy caregivers.

Our family is not Rockwellian, and it’s not picture perfect, but it’s ours. This is our boys’ heritage – all of it: the Southern Baptist part, the Mormon part, and the part that still has one foot stuck in the shtetls of Eastern Europe and on the boats that brought my Grandparents across the ocean to a place of struggle, success, and yes, Christmas.

America holds the promise of so much: so much excess, so much confusion, and so much mixing of people and their identities. The identities, though, do not melt as in a pot; rather, they are tossed together in a joyous raucousness, each part wholly distinguishable from the next, but together creating a medley that is unique and surprising and beautiful in its complexity.

Happy holidays from our mixed up family to yours.

• Posted in Parenting, Traditions
• Tags: Christmas, featured, Mayim Bialik

For a long time my feelings about Christmas fell into the pleasantly ambivalent category. Sure, I might become slightly irritated when a national retailer had the nerve to run holiday commercials before Thanksgiving, and the whole tipping thing stressed me out. Mostly, though, I just enjoyed the influx of treats at the office and the general glitteriness of the city.

Recently the holiday season has become trickier.

“I’m a Jewish people so I don’t have Christmas,” Zachary, my almost 5-year-old said matter-of-factly the other day while looking at a promo for a story called My Special Christmas Adventure on the back page of his Spiderman book.

“Yup,” I replied, relieved he was making a statement as opposed to asking a question I might have trouble answering.

“Why can’t we decorate our house like Aida and Violet did?”

Crap. It was time for another thoughtful, carefully-worded spiel—the kind that doesn’t make Christmas and the people who celebrate it seem so foreign, so other, but one that also doesn’t make it seem like we Jews get shafted.

Naturally, I changed the subject. (Turns out Zachary is more concerned about how Peter Parker is Spiderman than he is about our unlit, wreathless front porch. Phew.)

You’d think I’d have this down by now—my other son is two and a half years older than Zachary. But while we’ve faced many challenges in the course of raising Benjamin, who has autism, making him feel okay about not getting a visit from Santa has not been one of them.

Don’t get me wrong—Benjamin is definitely interested in Christmas. But with him there’s no need for nuanced explanations, and not really because his lack of expressive language means he can’t ask questions.

I believe Benjamin’s appreciation of the holiday is an entirely visual, sensory-oriented thing. He likes how the lights look and how the scrunchy tinsel and prickly pine needles feel. And because of his social deficits, he doesn’t care about what his peers are doing. In other words, while he’s happy to go next door to Aida and Violet’s house and check out their impressive tree, it doesn’t bother him that we don’t have one, too.

The other day, on a neighborhood walk, Benjamin stopped to admire an elaborately decorated row house. There were elves and reindeer and red velvet ribbons, but the piece de resistance was a faded, child-sized Santa riding a train. Before I could stop him, Benjamin opened the gate, letting himself into the tiny front garden.

“Train!” he said, jumping up and down.

I wish I could have let him hang out longer, wowing me with more (rarely produced) spontaneous comments, but he was technically trespassing. So I pried him off Santa and nudged him back onto the sidewalk. We walked on in silence, enjoying the general glitteriness of the city.

• Posted in Parenting, Traditions
• Tags: Autism, Christmas