A VERY LITTLE CHRISTMAS Growing up in a home of unorthodox holiday traditions FINAL EDITION, C

• Published in: Chicago tribune (1963)
• Main Author: Jeffrey C.B. Levine
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Chicago, Ill Tribune Publishing Company, LLC 22.12.1991
• ISSN: 1085-6706

December evokes in most people fond remembrances of the holiday celebrations they enjoyed as children and of ceremonies and traditions followed year after year, with the unchanging, unquestioning sureness of a train on a regular route. Growing up in a family with a Jewish father and an Episcopalian mother, however, meant approaching the holidays with an altogether different sort of zest. For us, the holiday season was a shifting and unstable battleground, upon which, come December, each family member plotted to gain precious territory. My father was almost always outnumbered in our annual skirmishes. He was raised in a strict Jewish household, and even though he became an atheist as an adult, his upbringing resulted in a vehement rejection of any of the symbols of the Christian holiday. However, as a result of a truce reached before my two siblings and I entered the picture, our parents gave us no instruction in either Jewish or Christian holiday customs. As children left to make up our own minds, we were naturally pulled towards Christmas rather than Hannukah-the gifts were more plentiful, the decorations more lavish, the holiday itself more widely practiced and commercialized. Thus, faced with pressure from an Episcopalian wife and three children giddy with the seductive charms of Christmas, my father assumed the role of gatekeeper on the road of Yuletide symbols, and every December became a contest to see how many of the trappings of Christmas we could sneak, cajole or bull past him. He, in turn, would try half-heartedly to introduce elements of Hannukah into the event. Thus my family came to practice a bare-bones hybrid of the holidays celebrated by Christians and Jews, with sporadic and confusing elements of each.