I have a Chanukah confession to make. I like Christmas. I have to thank Dennis Prager, a favorite Jewish pundit of mine, for my newfound honesty. He recently opened the closet door.
“I enjoy the Christmas season a great deal,” says Dennis in one of his books, a collection of ultimate-issues essays.
My family has long been aware of my weakness and attributed it to my peculiar form of insanity — an eccentricity (that’s my word, theirs is nutty) about Judeo-Christian affairs. My Jewish friends — most of them — don’t dream I’m a Christmas lover.
I can’t help it. I know that I should feel “uncomfortable” during December. A word most of my Jewish friends use. Why uncomfortable? I suppose because the season is full of reminders that numerically we’re a small island in a dominant sea of Christianity. We feel different, unique. Not a bad way to feel, I say. I guarantee you that Elijah felt uncomfortable. So did Ruth and the rebellious Maccabee brothers.
Being different is nothing new to us. We’ve had three millennia of practice in building sea walls around our island. We lived as a minority within the grasp of every significant society that has molded the Western mind: Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman and Anglo-Saxon, to name a few. And our defenses — those weird dictates in the Chumash that accented and advertised our uniqueness — worked to perfection. The Christmas season, when the air is heavy with carols and bells and Christmas greetings, is a fine challenge.
Admit it. A bowl of tsimmes — next to that big baked ham on the Christmas table — seems like an owl in the Pear Tree. But as Gerard Manley Hopkins, a great Christian poet says, “Glory be to God for dappled things” — by which he means diversity — a recently rediscovered concept.
So one reason I like Christmas is its reminder that I’m different.
And there’s that island metaphor. Sure we’re isolated, but we sent our explorers and their Jewish cup ’round the ocean currents of the world. Christmas reminds me of that, too. “White Christmas,” chestnuts roasting on the fire, and many other bundles of yuletide films and books; and most significantly the child who’s the centerpiece of this adoration — all Jewish products.
This dawned on me one December afternoon in 1938. Me and the rest of my third-grade class were singing Christmas carols. “Noel, Noel, born is the King of I-I-I-I-Israel.” I was — as usual —shall we say “uncomfortable.” Those alien songs underlined my lack of credentials for the love of Betty Ann McIntosh. As if I didn’t have enough trouble — once a year for two full weeks she was reminded that I was some exotic species different from her own.
Then I heard more clearly the words of the song — “Born is the King of Israel.” Hey, this lyric had something to do with me and my kind.
But if you are one of the yuletide uncomfortables, one night before Christmas you should warm yourself with a nice cuppa tea (flavored by a spoonful or two of rum) and think: Isn’t it amazing that my team is only 2 percent of this nation, yet I can hear the faint strain of klezmer behind the Christmas bells.
I like the music and the food. The lights, too. And best of all, the rare attention paid to civility and kindness. I think it’s a season when Christians earnestly examine their behavior and try to improve it. It’s a Christian Yom Kippur.
And as to those who talk about the materialism of Christmas, well it all depends on what kind of spectacles you’re wearing. Giving away your December paycheck in the form of gifts to others seems to me an excess of generosity, not the acquisition mania that characterizes materialism.
Ted Roberts is a humorist based in Huntsville, Ala.