Every December, traditionalists lament the latest challenge to Christmas. There are surely culprits in our politically correct world, but for this one, don鈥檛 blame the Jews.
The truth is the Jews love Christmas. Many feel the loss of the Christmas, just like the one we used to know, with as much regret as Christians.
As Jews learned to live as a permanent minority over the millennia, they learned to live with Christmas. In fact, many enjoy it. For us, like so many unobservant Christians, Christmas is not religious but cultural.
Learning to live with it meant more than coping on Christmas Day as the bereft, bored outsider in an English Protestant or French Catholic Canada, where everything shut down. It is more than the statutory lunch in Chinatown followed by an afternoon movie. Rest assured, both practices are sanctioned by the Torah.
Yet even that counter-culture tradition is fading. The half-empty Chinese restaurants are full now 鈥� usually with a swelling population of Chinese, who want to eat as much as the Jews.
What is interesting, though, is the number of Caucasians (read Christians) there, too. They seem to prefer Peking Duck to Butterball Turkey.
And the afternoon movie? The multiplex is no longer exclusively a Jewish refuge, either. Many there are not of Hebraic persuasion. A friend says her family goes to a film on Christmas Day to avoid fighting anymore with each other (the ceasefire beginning after one more fight, over the choice of movie.) Studios now release blockbusters on Dec. 25. This is not a plot by Hollywood鈥檚 dominant 鈥淛ewish鈥� moguls to serve their co-religionists; they just know those theatres are full of Gentiles as well.
If the Jewish counter-Christmas is disappearing as surely as the traditional Christmas, blame a diverse, secular, unconscious society. In a less Christian world, Christmas Day no longer means things close down. In suburban Los Angeles, for example, you can shop at supermarkets and drugstores.
Traditional Christmas is also a casualty of the cult of efficiency. So it is with the poor, embattled Christmas card.
Once mantelpieces in living rooms groaned with cards of all shapes and sizes. Some hung them in red ribbon from the staircase. It was festive.
Some people still send real cards. They are made for display and suitable for framing. Many come with a hand-written note or a newsy letter. Most are too nice to throw away.
Then are those that arrive by email. Most are not personal, and those that are run the risk of getting lost in the deluge. Like most email, they go no farther than your iPhone, about as important as a leaflet dropped over occupied Europe.
At a certain level, perhaps we should feel good about deconsecrating Christmas. Doing away with Christmas symbols, or downplaying them, allows us to feel 鈥渋nclusive,鈥� a watchword of our times. No one left behind, as the marines say.
As a Jew, Christmas was never about exclusion for me. Christmas was about envy, not resentment. I learned Christmas carols at Roslyn School in the Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal (much as we learned the Christian hymns and prayers the rest of the year). Performing in the annual Christmas pageant did not threaten my identity or diminish my faith.
If it was hard to be a Jew at Christmas, it wasn鈥檛 because of prejudice. While we regretted that we did not trim a tree or exchange presents (though my sweet mother put up a pillow case for me by the fireplace one Christmas Eve), we adjusted.
In 1960s Canada, the apartness was real. It would come home to me the day after Christmas when I visited a friend鈥檚 home 鈥� the smell of bacon filling the air, remnants of wrapping paper in the living room, new skates or books in the bedroom 鈥� and nothing for me, nose pressed longingly against the cultural glass.
Today, I like carols, Christmas markets and the Messiah in any language in any venue. I like midnight mass. I like family trees wearing ornaments with a past.
Ultimately, though, I am not a Christian, and Christmas is not my thing, much as I savour it from a distance. Our family has never had a tree. We had won ton soup on Dec. 25.
Years ago, at a nativity play at our community centre, the director innocently asked if my son of two months could be baby Jesus in a straw-strewn manger.
I refused. He asked why. 鈥淔ive thousand years of history,鈥� I said.
鈥淥f course,鈥� he said. Merry Christmas.
听
Andrew Cohen is a professor of journalism and international affairs at Carleton University in Ottawa.
