Everyone can share in the love of Christmas

It wasn’t until I was 27, in 1982, that I learned to share my house with Christmas.
I grew up in a nonobservant but culturally Jewish home. Christmas wasn’t our holiday. Hanukkah - minor Jewish holiday that it is - was not a big deal either.
Many of my friends were Christian so I partook of the Christmas spirit, but only when I visited their homes.
Not even my hard-shell Baptist friend ever suggested that, as a Jew, I couldn’t possibly understand the meaning of Christmas.
She and her family believed that there was only one true path, but they treated me with extraordinary warmth. Her house was always a fun place to be, but during the Christmas season love was almost a palpable presence under their roof.
I never felt like an alien walking through their front door.
Still, Christmas was their holiday, not mine. I was just a visitor who enjoyed the good cheer then left - temporarily uplifted, perhaps, but never transformed.
But after Michele and I became a couple, it soon became evident that I no longer would be able to keep Christmas at arm’s length. Michele was raised Catholic, but like me wasn’t observant.
Except for Christmas. Christmas for her is huge.
She loves the smell of a Christmas tree and the joy of decorating it. Our first Christmas after we married, I was on crutches following ankle surgery. Hobbled as I was, it was impossible not to be caught up in the spirit of the joyful event and its meaning - at least the meaning that she gives it and the one that I have learned to give it, too.
Love and giving.
All due respect to Christians who find deep religious meaning in Christmas and insist on keeping the Christ in the holiday. More power to them. The Christ, as I understand it, is much about love and giving.
But love and giving are neither exclusively religious nor solely Christian. They’re universal.
That’s why I find the almost hysterical debate about “merry Christmas” versus “happy holidays” to be one more maddening example of how far we’ve fallen in our civic - and civil - relations.
I can only assume that those Christians who’ve taken this debate to extremes (a minority, I suspect) somehow feel threatened. That’s something I also don’t understand, since those who identify themselves as Christians are still the vast majority in this country.
To some extent, I relate it to my own sense of alienation a few years ago. Even in my own house.
At the time I was developing a much stronger sense of my Jewish identity, a greater appreciation for the tradition and values that I’d never developed earlier in life. It was a difficult struggle for someone who had become assimilated into secular American culture fairly seamlessly.
As a result, it became harder for me to coexist with Michele’s tradition. I didn’t make a fuss, but Christmas became somewhat less comfortable for me - perhaps similar to how some Christians perceive “happy holidays” as an assault on who they are and what they believe even when that’s not the case.
Eventually, I came to a more universalist perspective - on Christmas, as a celebration of love and life, and faith in general. Now I find joy in the holiday again.
Not long ago, in my grandmother’s lifetime, Jews, Christians and Muslims in what used to be called Palestine lived peacefully among each other and together often celebrated their holidays and important life passages. Paradise lost, maybe someday to be rediscovered.
Maybe we’ll rediscover ours, too.

Originally published December 23, 2005 in the Tallahassee Democrat at http://www.tallahassee.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051223/OPINION/512230336/1006 and reprinted in TAM with permission of the author.