Jewish in December

I deliberately live in a place surrounded by all kinds of other people. My town is a veritable melting pot of cultures and religions, from Catholic to Hindi, from Muslim to Jewish, as I am.  In a country where two per cent of the population is Jewish, my area is a good ten per cent, maybe a little more. And because of this, the grocery store carries a fair selection of Passover foods in the spring, the school system gives off for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and people don't blink when you send them Bat Mitzvah invitations.

But in December, even in my corner of multicultural America, it all stops. I am the outsider, and I'm reminded every day until the New Year's Ball drops down on Times Square.

The frenzy can start as early as the beginning of November with what are you getting your family for Christmas. The commercials with Santa Claus commence, the references to the intense preparation begins. Malls are already sporting Christmas trees, decorations, and Christmas music. (I will not enter a mall, except under extreme duress, from Thanksgiving until the beginning of January.)  By the day after Thanksgiving, I can no longer listen to my regular radio station, because they insist on playing Christmas music 24 hous a day. Nevermind that I have emailed them several times about this, expressing that there are non-Christmas-celebrators in their midst. They don't care, they say, because the majority of their audience likes 24 hour a day Christmas music. (By the way, some Christmas music is very pretty, and I enjoy listening to it.  But a solid month or five weeks seems completely unnecessary.)

The schools, which are supposed to be religious-neutral, also get into the spirit.  My daughter's high school puts up a Christmas tree, and there are Christmas decorations and Santa hats.

I have no problem with people celebrating their holiday.  As a family, we like to drive around and look at the Christmas lights people put up while simultaneously trying to guess how much more their electric bill is for the month of December.  We enjoy going to the movies on Christmas day with the rest of the Jews, and then deciding between the Kosher deli and the Chinese place for dinner.  But around us is this faint feeling of....distance.  I'm looking at the place I live through a different lens in December, a place where I don't fit in, nor is my desire to keep us a religiously neutral society valued.  People don't want me to tell them theat I don't think Christmas symbols belong in their government buildings. They don't want me to remind them that Christmas is, in fact, not for everyone in America, and that some of us don't recognize it as the day Christ was born, simply because we don't acknowledge that Christ is God's son.  Some of us aren't even so sure about the God part, frankly.

You may be reading this and shaking your head. But Christmas is fun, you might be saying! It's the happiest time of the year! (Actually, I beg to differ on that one. Most of my friends appear stressed and exhausted from all the work, but that's another post.)  And yes, I do know plenty of people (including some Jews) who view Christmas not as a religious holiday at all, but as a celebration of fun and goodness, and an excuse to buy presents for the people they love.  But that's not who I am, nor who my family is. To us, Christmas is a Christian holiday, meant to honor a religious event, an event we don't acknowledge. But because so many people celebrate it -- in fact, because our supposedly religious-neutral government celebrates it by giving it Federal Holiday status -- we must glide through December, trying to forget that this is our America, too, and that come January, everything will be reset.  It will be the same place it is for eleven months of the year, where we can all embrace difference once again.