How I Lost Christmas
By
Leonard Zwelling
Let me start by wishing all of my Christian readers a Merry Christmas. I want to preface this blog with good wishes so that no one will mistake this story as being antagonistic to the Christian holiday. It’s just that Christmas has really evolved for me over many years. Here’s the story.
America in the mid-1950s was a very different place than it is today. In the public schools at this time of year most classrooms had a Christmas tree. I say most because my mother refused to have one in her 5th-grade classroom. My parents believed in strict separation of church and state and my mother would not allow a religious symbol in her public-school classroom. I am not sure that a Christmas tree is a religious symbol, but it is surely associated with a Christian holiday and my Jewish mother would not have any of that in her classroom.
By contrast, my elementary school classrooms all had Christmas trees and at some point before Christmas break all the students decorated the tree—including me. That was the first time I ever saw tinsel.
In Music class, yes, we had Music class then (and Gym, Home Economics, and Shop), we sang Christmas carols. I knew the words to all of them. It wasn’t just that America was a Christian nation. There was a complete lack of representation of any other religious holiday occurring at the same time of year. I had to explain to my first-grade class what Chanukah was. They were all astounded we had eight days of gifts. My teacher had to call my mother as some of the children in my first-grade class expressed an interest in converting to Judaism. But Christmas, in the 1950s and 1960s, was for all Americans.
That was then. Thus, Christmas was definitely my holiday, too.
It even lasted until high school. In late 1965 the leaders of the school and the high school service organizations spent the Saturday before Christmas dressed as Santa (the guys) and elves (the girls) giving gifts to local children on the streets of downtown Bellmore. When my rabbi found out that his Jewish congregants were dressing up and acting like Santa Claus on the Jewish sabbath, he was most displeased.
Every Christmas, the high school choir performed a Christmas show. We marched into the auditorium singing O Come, All Ye Faithful holding real candles. Every other year we got to sing the Hallelujah Chorus. As an officer in the choir, I was obviously there fully participating. Christmas was still my holiday, too.
At Duke, as a freshman, I felt very out of place. There were very few Jewish men in the freshman class and even fewer Jewish women. Religion was still a big part of the Duke curriculum and that religion was Christianity. There had yet to be a Jewish professor in the Department of Religion at Duke. That happened after I got there.
All Duke freshmen had to take a preliminary religion course. I took Religion 1 and 2, the Old Testament and the New Testament. The second semester consisted of cover-to-cover reading of the New Testament. For me, unlike for my classmates, it was for the first time.
My teacher was a Methodist minister who was an expert in the Pauline Letters. For the first time, I learned the basis of Christianity and its profound difference from Judaism. Yes, both religions use the Old Testament, but Christianity is driven by the philosophy found in the New Testament. It was then that I understood that Judaism is a religion of laws and Christianity a religion of faith. Suddenly, I understood that Christmas is of great importance beyond Santa Claus and carols. I also understood that Christmas was not my holiday.
Over the years since then, I drifted farther and farther away from any celebration of Christmas. I did have Christmas parties for my office when I was a vice president, but I never really celebrated Christmas again.
Today, I am probably more Jewish than I have ever been in my life. I can thank the BW for that as well as terrific rabbis at Congregation Beth Israel, especially the current one, Rabbi David Lyon, and my guiding star of religiosity Rabbi Yossi of the Shul of Bellaire, my Chabad teacher.
Recently, a Christian friend from another part of the country, a part where there are very few Jews, asked me what I was doing for Christmas. I answered plainly. “It is not my holiday,” but (like Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan said to her inquisitors on Capitol Hill during her confirmation hearing,) “I’ll probably go to the movies and have Chinese food.”
I lost Christmas a long time ago. Living in Houston makes that easy with a vibrant Jewish community and temperatures reaching the 80s on Christmas. No snow here. I only remember one white Christmas in our 41 years here and my 37-year-old son Andrew was still in high school for that.
I loved Christmas when it was my holiday. It hasn’t been my holiday for a long time, but for those of you whose holiday it is, MERRY CHRISTMAS.
In truth, I lost nothing when I read the New Testament for the first time. On the contrary. I gained a new respect for the basis of Christianity and the beauty of its philosophy. It is very different from Judaism, but no less weighty.
Every time I go to Jerusalem, I try to walk the Fourteen Stages of the Cross ending in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the site of the crucifixion as well as the tomb of Jesus. I am always moved. To me this is the essence of Christianity—the miracle of Easter. Once I grasped that, Christmas seemed less important to my understanding of Christianity.
Nonetheless, Christmas is a great celebration and a great holiday. But as I told my acquaintance who lives in a town with no synagogue, “Christmas is not my holiday.” I guess I could have added, “any longer.” Merry Christmas.
