Christmas is Why We Send Our Son to Jewish Day School

By Lauren Apfel for Raising Kvell

I am not a practicing Jew, but I don’t celebrate Christmas either. My husband is a lapsed Christian and a loather of all things Yule. Late December has always been an uncomfortable time in our house. Until, that is, we decided four years ago to send our kids to a Jewish school.

It was a surprisingly easy decision, made for a host of sound reasons, exactly the ones you would expect to figure into a choice about the expanse of your children’s education. But it also solved the problem of Christmas for us and this has turned out to be one of its most wonderful virtues.

I spent the holiday season as a girl in small Jewish niche towns–Great Neck and Boca Raton–where the passing of Christmas was marked in its own ritualistic way, with Chinese food and a trip to the movies. So many happy memories. When I moved to the United Kingdom 14 years ago, however, Christmas became a dark and almost unbearable period, something to escape, not to indulge in. It triggered in me a strong desire to flee homeward and back to a place where there is still a life to be lived on the 25th of December that doesn’t involve a decorated pine tree.

In the UK, it is near impossible to opt out of Christmas in a way that is comprehensible to the neighbors. We are a country with an established religion and this makes us both culturally and constitutionally different from the United States. In America, diversity of religion is built into the national edifice, which has the effect of increasing awareness, even if imperfectly, that not everybody celebrates Christmas. Hanukkiyahs appear in shopping malls amidst the wreathes of holly; greeting cards can be purchased with vague well-wishes that don’t include the C-word. Not so on this side of the Atlantic.

Here, people rarely–and I mean rarely–acknowledge an alternative to welcoming Santa through the chimney with open arms, even those who are self-proclaimed atheists. From the beginning of November, Christmas rears its green and red head, boldly, ubiquitously, and without the faintest pretension that Britain is a multicultural society. The idea is that Christmas is a secular holiday, a festival simply for family and feasting and fun. It is all of those things, true enough, but it is also a marker of the birth of Christ and for some of us who live in these borders there is no way around this point of origin.

 Continue reading.