Little Stories: The Christmas Tree

A tale of mixed holiday messaging.

(Illustration by Etsy user BestSvgAndPngFiles)

Little Stories, focusing on memories from my youth, is a recurring feature of Inconspicuous Consumption. You can see more Little Stories here.

When I was growing up on Long Island, the Christmas season was often a confusing time. On the one hand, our family was Jewish, at least nominally. But we never went to synagogue, we didn’t fast for Yom Kippur, I never received any religious training, and I wasn’t bar mitzvahed like my older brothers had been. (They were 12 and 15 years older than I was, so I was almost like a whole new generation.) We did light a menorah each year for Hanukkah, but my father and I would bet on which candle would stay lit the longest, so it wasn’t exactly a holy observance. There were no other Jewish kids in my elementary school, so I didn’t have anyone to compare our family to, but the question of “how Jewish” we actually were was often in the back of my mind.

Adding to the confusion, my oldest brother was born on December 25th. Since our family was always celebrating his birthday on that day anyway, a lot of Yuletide culture sort of bled into our celebration over the years, including the exchange of Christmas gifts and my belief in Santa Claus. When I was in first grade — this would have been December of 1970 — my parents let me sit on a sidewalk Santa’s lap and tell him what I wanted for Christmas (he dutifully brought the toy I requested, a game called Tip-It, a few weeks later), and the next year my mom even left out a dish of cookies and a glass of milk for Santa (naturally, they were half-consumed when we woke up in the morning).

Thanks, Santa! (Photo by eBay user BlackHoleDepository)

My parents also let me watch all of the classic animated TV Christmas specials each year — Frosty, The Grinch, Rudolph, The Year Without a Santa Claus, A Charlie Brown Christmas. One year they even let me have a prominent role in a nativity play that my class was putting on at school (which in retrospect seems nuts on several levels).

The one thing we didn’t have, however, was a Christmas tree. We had an indoor lemon tree in our sun room, and my mom would decorate it with a few ornaments each December, but it was nothing like a real Christmas tree. When friends came over and saw it, I was secretly embarrassed.

Or maybe not so secretly. I must have complained to my parents about this, because one year — maybe when I was in fourth grade? — my father came home with a real evergreen tree. We decorated it with lots of ornaments and oceans of tinsel, and my mom even got out a needle and thread and showed me how to string together a popcorn/cranberry garland. The capper, literally and figuratively, came when my father put a glittery star on the top of the tree.

A big part of this, I think, is that my parents didn’t want me to feel too “different.” And to a certain extent, it worked: When my friends came over that year, I’d proudly point to our tree. Most of them were suitably impressed, but I also a recall a few conversations that went something like this:

Neighborhood friend: Why do you have a Christmas tree? Aren’t you Jewish?

Me: Yeah. But my brother’s birthday is on Christmas Day.

Friend: So this tree is for your brother?

Me: Well, no. We sort of celebrate everything on that day.

Friend: I don’t understand. Do you celebrate Hanukkah too?

Me: Yeah. Kind of.

Friend: On Christmas?

Me: No, we do Hanukkah on Hannukah, and then we do Christmas on Christmas. And my brother’s birthday.

Friend: Wow, so do you get two sets of gifts? And does your brother get three sets of gifts?

Me: No, we don’t do gifts for Hanukkah. Only for Christmas.

Friend: Is that how every Jewish family does it?

Me: Um, I don’t really know.

It all amounted to a lot of mixed messaging about religion, holidays, family heritage, and so on. I could never figure out how to create a straightforward linear narrative out of it (hence the awkward conversations like the one I just described), but I never said anything about that to my parents because, frankly, I liked all the Christmas trappings — the tree, the milk and cookies for Santa, the TV specials. I was afraid that if I started asking too many questions, my parents might scrap all of that and we’d just have the menorah and the lemon tree. Even worse, they might decide we had to start going to synagogue, which I was pretty sure I wanted no part of.

Looking back, I can see how my parents were probably trying to strike a balance between lots of competing interests and impulses, including their respective upbringings in fairly religious Jewish households, their eventual embrace of a more secular lifestyle (and what their own parents thought about that), the larger cultural issue of Jewish assimilation, their standing in an overwhelmingly Christian town, their role as parents of a little boy who desperately wanted his family to be “normal,” and maybe even what it meant to be middle-class Americans during an era when Christmas had primarily became an expression of consumer capitalism. All of which is to say, the annual December holiday routine was probably at least as confusing for them as it was for me.

After a few years, my parents stopped doing the Christmas tree, and then they stopped bringing out the menorah as well. Since our family never really established a consistent holiday tradition, my Christmas experiences as an adult have mostly been a mishmash. But over the past decade or so, a bunch of my closest friends have developed the ritual of gathering for Christmas dinner at my friend Garth’s house, so that’s what I’ll be doing tomorrow. And thanks to a quirk of the calendar, December 25th is also the first night of Hanukkah this year. Maybe I’ll bring a little menorah and we can bet on which candle stays lit the longest.

However you’re spending the holiday, I hope it’s a good one. And seriously, thanks so much for your support and enthusiasm for Inconspicuous Consumption over the past half-year — that’s been the best gift ever, Christmas or otherwise. — Paul

Paul Lukas has been obsessing over the inconspicuous for most of his life, and has been writing about those obsessions for more than 30 years. You can contact him here.