This year I will be celebrating Christmas with my Jewish-Muslim friend. Things are relatively simple for me; I'm just Jewish. But Emma's Christmas is a complicated triptych. While many Jews around the world celebrate some version of Christmas, it is rare for a Muslim to do so, even though Islam recognises Jesus as a prophet, while Judaism does not. Of course, we don't exercise ourselves about this overmuch. Like many Christmases, ours is mainly focused on cake. But celebrating Christmas as a non-Christian is undeniably a contrivance.
When I was growing up, my family were so anti-assimilation that when it came to 25th December we didn't even have lunch. But I like snow, chestnuts, tinsel, and when Emma and I graduated, we decided to start having our own Christmases. This will be our eighth year. Of course, ours are not particularly traditional. Santa I can do without. And other elements are conspicuously missing - no tree, no turkey, no Queen's Christmas message. But we have a pudding, presents, fairy lights, sherry and lots of lunch, and being untrammelled by tradition makes the planning all the more pleasurable - we can have a Mexican theme one year (warning: guacamole and sherry are a terrible combination) and a full roast the next.
It's quite definitely ersatz rather than echt - but then so is my Hanukah. Certainly, on Hanukah, I light candles and say a prayer and eat traditional foods, but I am as likely to do this with my non-Jewish friends as with my Jewish ones. And it's probably more of a spiritual travesty to celebrate Hanukah with people of different faiths. Hanukah is, after all, a holiday which commemorates a successful Jewish revolt in the 2nd century BC against Syrian oppression, and a refusal to assimilate into the prevailing Hellenistic culture. Then again, I don't know why more people don't celebrate Hanukah. It's based on candles, games, presents, songs, latkes and doughnuts (the oil in the fried food symbolising the oil which miraculously kept the Temple's eternal flame going for eight extra days). What's not to like? As Adam Sandler says in his Hanukah song: "Instead of one day of presents, we have eight crazy nights."
Hanukah never used to be a particularly important holiday, but thanks to American commercialisation, it has been rebranded the "Jewish Christmas," mainly because it usually happens in December (although the vagaries of the lunar calendar mean it can fall any time from November). Some American Jews, semi-ironically, call their Christmas trees "Hanukah bushes," sticking a Star of David on top and hanging bagels and (worse) dreidels off the branches. I haven't yet had a tree but if I did, I wouldn't call it a Hanukah bush (as one Jewish joke has it, "last time we had dealings with a lighted bush we spent 40 years in the wilderness"). I'm not pretending to celebrate Hanukah when I celebrate Christmas, or vice versa. I'm happy celebrating both.
One of the reasons Emma and I became friends is because my parents are from Iraq and her father is from Syria. Islam is patrilineal, while to be Jewish you have to have a Jewish mother. So if Emma's father had been Jewish and her mother Muslim, she might have had no religious affiliation at all. In fact, she has celebrated Christmas more often than Hanukah, or Eid al-Fitr, the festival which closes Ramadan, and which some have tried to rebrand "the Muslim Christmas" - with little success.
If British Jews tend politely to avoid Christmas, our US counterparts do the opposite. Christmas songs written by Tin Pan Alley Jews include Mel Torm? and Robert Wells Levinson's ode to chestnuts roasting on the open fire, Johnny Marks's "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," and, of course, as revealed in Jody Rosen's book, White Christmas: The Story of a Song, there's the fantasy of a winter wonderland, composed by Irving Berlin, the son of a Siberian cantor, whose real name was Israel Baline. In his novel Operation Shylock, Philip Roth's alter ego riffs on the theme: "God gave Moses the ten commandments and then He gave Irving Berlin 'Easter Parade' and 'White Christmas.' The two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ - the divinity that's the very heart of the Jewish rejection of Christianity - and what does Irving Berlin brilliantly do? He de-Christs them both! Easter turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow."
Roth is partly right. Irving Berlin's Christmas, like my Christmas, is a secular holiday. But it's also about committing to where you happen to be. If you're a second generation immigrant with little chance of returning to your country of origin, or of fitting in once you get there, why not just accept that in doing something slightly bizarre, like celebrating Christmas as a Jew, or as a Muslim Jew, you are, paradoxically, part of a long tradition of improvising rituals? Transatlantic Christmases are almost entirely modelled on the Victorian Christmases we think we used to know. Santa Claus was only standardised as the image of Christmas after Coca-Cola started using a fat man in a red suit as their festive icon. And when I bake for Christmas I get my recipes from another deracinated Jew, Nigella Lawson, for whom, a bit like me, Christmas is mainly about homemaking.
