Christmas

This year we spent Christmas in Los Angeles, where we were visiting our son and his family. For someone reared in the Northeast, the sight of Christmas lights in the vicinity of palm trees seemed bizarre, although Los Angeles resembles Bethlehem, from the point of view of climate and foliage, far more than does Boston, where I grew up. Bizarre or not, the Christmas decorations in Los Angeles had the same meaning for me as they had in Boston: “these lights are not for you.” Increasingly during the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas and culminating in the holiday itself, I feel slightly alienated from the American mainstream, a period in which I feel American, but not quite.

Our son’s response, when I told him of my estrangement from Christmas, was that the holiday is largely a commercial one, empty of religious content. Maybe he’s right. Certainly many Christian clerics deplore the holiday’s commercial emphasis. But America is one of the most religious countries in the world and a majority of our fellow citizens believe that Jesus is the Messiah, God in earthly form, and even if they don’t go to church on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, the symbols of the holiday are meaningful to them, for they represent their tradition.

But for me, each Christmas jingle and carol, each Christmas-themed advertisement, each suburban home decorated with colored lights, reminds me that Christmas is a Big Deal for almost everyone but me. When we lived in Jerusalem, I appreciated the escape from Christmas.

I asked my wife at breakfast if she feels as I do. Not at all, she said, for she grew up observing Christmas, when she and her family decorated a tree and exchanged presents. For her, Christmas is not an alien tradition. Indeed, I remember helping trim a tree at her grandmother’s house, using decorations that seemed to me to be at least a half a century old. At her grandmother's Christmas dinner, a cardboard chimney painted to look like brick served as the table’s centerpiece, with cotton batten, representing snow, surrounding it. Ribbons trailed from the chimney to each place setting. After everyone had gathered around the table, each would pull on his or her ribbon to withdraw from the chimney a small gift.

I found Christmas with my wife’s grandmother charming but alien nonetheless, and I couldn’t imagine adopting her traditions in my own home. But maybe that’s the secret to feeling part of things. Why not adopt Christmas as simply a gift-giving festival, a celebration of the winter solstice a few days late? The Japanese seem to have done that, even though very few of them are Christian. But the Japanese were never the victims of age-old Christian persecution, never grew up with taunts of “Jewboy.” For me, the symbols of Christianity are the symbols of oppression, so that my adoption of Christmas traditions would represent to me a betrayal of my heritage. This is, I know, irrational, but rationality has nothing to do with the matter.

Christmas has passed. Soon the colored lights and the reindeer on the lawns will be taken down and stored for the next season. And until then, I can feel fully American again, with perhaps a slight interruption at Easter.