A Christmas quandary

When I was a kid, Christmas meant going over to my grandparents apartment for a turkey dinner, which I started looking forward to the day after thanksgiving. Sure, we got presents, but my sister and I knew that it was just stuff Mom held back from our eight nights of Hanukkah so she could put something under the ficus that served as a Christmas tree in a concession to my Pop, (Dad's dad,) who was Italian. We never said Catholic; we just said "we celebrate Christmas for my Pop, because he's Italian."

I never felt like we missed out on anything by being Jewish. In fact, I must admit to feeling a little superior to my friends who believed in Santa Claus. I mean, what else did we have over the goyim? (At this point, I must also admit that I still believed in the tooth fairy. But that's like, reasonable, you know? Because it's not like every kid in the world is going to lose a tooth on the same night.)

When I was in college, I got caught up in the whole Christmas giving thing and started to stress about what to get for people, until I realized it wasn't even my holiday and promptly gave it up. That left me free to enjoy Christmas time, which is especially nice in New York, because people are in a good mood for a change and are actually nice to one another. Also, the lights are pretty.

But there's nothing like living in the Bible Belt to whip the holiday spirit right out of you, and after just one Christmas in North Carolina I was disgusted with the whole enterprise. First of all, the freakin' music starts the day after Halloween, and no joy can survive six weeks of Jingle Bell Rock. What's more, there's no recognition that anyone could be thinking about anything other than Christmas for the entire month of December. It becomes tiresome. And oppressive. Try saying, "Oh, I don't celebrate Christmas," in my old stomping grounds of Gastonia, NC, and I'll be damned if you don't get the same response as if you had just said, "Oh, I eat babies." Of course, I'll be damned anyway, but I digress.

I'm happy to say that I overcame my Christmas loathing not long ago when I started celebrating the holiday with my inlaws. It wasn't the magic of a white Christmas that did it (AnnaRay's mom had moved to Florida, where the Christmas lights are set up in the shape of flamingoes,) or waking up to a pile of presents under the tree, (the excessive gift-giving sort of freaked me out, actually,) but participating in their tradition made me feel more a part of their family, and I resolved to embrace it - their strictly secular version of the holiday - as my own.

This year, in hopes of avoiding the cross-country schlep with kid in tow at the hight of the traveling season, I offered - I campaigned! - to have Christmas in Portland.We'd have a tree and everything, I promised, and my offer was accepted. But then I started thinking about what it would mean to have a big, beautiful Christmas tree on display in the street-facing front windows of my home, and I started having second thoughts.

Here's the thing about being Jewish: we are by definition a wandering nation without a homeland. We have settled here and there, but for the most part have not assimilated, and it's only by jealously guarding our sacred Otherness that we have maintained our identity in the face of oppression for 2,000 years. Not a small feat. Anyway, in spite of my largely secular upbringing, I've incorporated into my world view the notion that if we Jews don't stand out in our societies, we must have assimilated, and that smacks of betrayal.

So what does it mean if I brighten our little green house with Christmas lights? Nothing, of course, except that I'm honoring the traditions of my spouse, just as she honors mine. (We are raising The Boy to be a Bar Mitzvah, after all.) Still, it does not sit well with me emotionally. I always feel a certain solidarity around this time of year with the other few neighbors living behind darkened house fronts, just like I always feel a connection to total strangers driving down the highway with a rainbow sticker on their bumper. It's a symbolic manifestation that we are different, and therefore we few stand together. But now I feel like a teenage geek leaving her nerdy friends behind to run off with the cool kids, and I'm worried what everyone will think. I tell myself to get over it, but I know it's something I will just have to grow out of.