The Girl Who Wanted a Christmas Tree
I don’t remember her name. But I remember her Christmas tree.
She and I were both about ten, in the same class, and I happened to visit the day her family put up their tree. It was tall and green, lit with colorful lights and gleaming with shiny ornaments. The family looked at it proudly. After I left, I burst into tears on the street. I wanted a Christmas tree!
It can be tough to be a Jewish kid in December.
I was luckier than most, because I lived in the Detroit suburb of Oak Park, then about forty percent Jewish. Only one house on my block had a Christmas tree. My brothers and I, like the other neighborhood kids, cut out construction paper menorahs and taped them to the windows, along with strings of letters reading “Happy Hanukkah.” My school had many Jewish kids, so that while I recall wreaths and Christmas songs (heavy on Frosty and Rudolph), kids talked as much about Hanukkah as they did at Christmas–or maybe more since Hanukkah usually fell before the Christmas break. And all of us, no matter our faith, united in envy when a couple of Jewish kids announced smugly they were getting eight gifts, one for each day of Hanukkah. Eight presents. In vain, I implored my parents to do likewise.
I did look forward to Hanukkah; the latkes, the lighting of the menorah, the gelt, the dreidels, and of course, the gifts (all two or three of them). But, though we lit the menorah each night for eight days, Hanukkah, in its sweet simplicity, was overshadowed by the month-long Christmas mania. We’d turn on the radio to everything from “Silent Night” to “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer.” On TV– reruns of A Christmas Carol and Miracle of 34th Street. At the malls, Christmas decorations in every store, and in a central spot, Santa, surrounded by lines of wide-eyed little kids. And of course, Christmas trees in the sixty percent of Oak Park that wasn’t Jewish. I couldn’t help but feel the pangs of being left out.
My tears dried by the time I arrived home that evening. I said nothing to my parents. I knew that Jews didn’t have Christmas trees because Christmas wasn’t our holiday. None of our relatives or Jewish neighbors had trees. There was nothing to be said.
One grows up.
In my twenties, a Christian roommate timidly asked me if she could put up a Christmas tree. Of course I said yes, and she urged me to help decorate. I put up a few ornaments, and that was enough. The tree was pretty, but the magic I once saw in it was gone.
Making my peace with Christmas has meant making peace with being Jewish in the United States. I’m part of a tiny minority. Yes, it can be lonely but that’s part of the complicated package of being a Jewish American.
I’m glad I never shared my Christmas-deprived sentiments with my parents. Though some Jewish families now decorate trees “for the kids,” I understand their choice not to. But eight days of Hanukkah presents–was that really too much to ask?
