before? What does a gingerbread house have to do with Jesus?
So there we were: two newlywed Jews celebrating our No No Noel (or Ho Ho Hanukkah) with no excuse other than the fact that I wanted monogrammed velvet stockings and Ian wanted—it turned out—the train set that goes around the tree and puffs actual smoke.
That train (which took two hours to assemble) was the first sign that our Christmas might not be all peace on earth, goodwill toward men. The vision dancing in my head was clearly Pottery Barn, whereas Ian’s, I fear, was SkyMall.
He bought colored blinking lights when I was definitely thinking white, and he ordered old-timey glass ornaments—a slice of pizza, a mermaid, a hippo—instead of the understated jewel-colored balls that I had in mind. Plus he kept talking about the fake snow (“Should we get the blanket or just use cotton balls?”) when I wasn’t thinking fake snow at all. I definitely hadn’t seen any fake snow in the Pottery Barn catalog. And then at Home Depot, I practically had to pry the mechanical lawn snowman out of his hands. Ian was like a Christmas crackhead . . . one taste, and he couldn’t stop.
But despite our differences, we both loved the little winter wonderland we finally settled on. Some nights when I got home before Ian, I put on our Starbucks Christmas CD and lit a fire and turned on the tree lights and played with the different settings (disco fast, then twinkly slow) and put liquid smoke in the train’s smokestack and turned on the choo-choo sound effects and then sat back and enjoyed my first Christmas in all its kitschy splendor. I felt a little guilty when I looked at our lone menorah on the mantel (the only evidence of my faith other than my guilt), but I ask you: how could this much pleasure be wrong?
Before you answer that, fellow Jews (including you, Dad), let me just say that Ian and I were fairly certain that once we had kids, we would raise them with the same rules we were raised with, trying our best to sell that old chestnut (roasting on an open fire) that “eight nights are better than one,” and putting this tradition behind us until the kids went off to college, if not forever. It seemed easy enough to hide the evidence. I accidentally dropped an old-timey basket-of-cherries ornament, and it shattered into a powder so fine there was no trace it ever existed.
On the other hand, I started to wonder if it might be nice to teach children that holidays can be done à la carte. Every religion, every culture, has so many beautiful rituals and traditions. Maybe celebrating is a step toward tolerating. Maybe our family would ring in Hanukkwanzaa.
Or maybe I was rationalizing because I had become so intoxicated by the scent of pine needles and poinsettias that I couldn’t imagine life without them! Just as once you fly first class, it’s hard to go back to coach—once you have Christmas, it’s hard to go back to no Christmas.
That’s why we have the ornaments, the lights, the train, the stockings, and the giant inflatable lawn penguin (Ian’s idea, in case there was any question) in storage unit R3176. No No Noel has become a tradition for us, not instead of Hanukkah, but in addition. It’s no longer a novelty, but . . . we like it, okay?
And marriage, for better or worse, means you have a full-time, live-in enabler. That’s one of my favorite aspects of marriage, actually—the fact that your partner in life can be your partner in crime. Together, you can create new traditions, make your own rules, and break your own rules.
Christmas isn’t the only holiday Ian and I bent to our will. We started out, as most couples do, trying to alternate Thanksgivings between our families. One year we’d go to Dallas (where my sister and parents now live), the next we’d go to Pittsburgh (where Ian’s brother was doing his medical residency), and so on and so on—our plan until we had kids of our own, at which point people might finally come to us so
So there we were: two newlywed Jews celebrating our No No Noel (or Ho Ho Hanukkah) with no excuse other than the fact that I wanted monogrammed velvet stockings and Ian wanted—it turned out—the train set that goes around the tree and puffs actual smoke.
That train (which took two hours to assemble) was the first sign that our Christmas might not be all peace on earth, goodwill toward men. The vision dancing in my head was clearly Pottery Barn, whereas Ian’s, I fear, was SkyMall.
He bought colored blinking lights when I was definitely thinking white, and he ordered old-timey glass ornaments—a slice of pizza, a mermaid, a hippo—instead of the understated jewel-colored balls that I had in mind. Plus he kept talking about the fake snow (“Should we get the blanket or just use cotton balls?”) when I wasn’t thinking fake snow at all. I definitely hadn’t seen any fake snow in the Pottery Barn catalog. And then at Home Depot, I practically had to pry the mechanical lawn snowman out of his hands. Ian was like a Christmas crackhead . . . one taste, and he couldn’t stop.
But despite our differences, we both loved the little winter wonderland we finally settled on. Some nights when I got home before Ian, I put on our Starbucks Christmas CD and lit a fire and turned on the tree lights and played with the different settings (disco fast, then twinkly slow) and put liquid smoke in the train’s smokestack and turned on the choo-choo sound effects and then sat back and enjoyed my first Christmas in all its kitschy splendor. I felt a little guilty when I looked at our lone menorah on the mantel (the only evidence of my faith other than my guilt), but I ask you: how could this much pleasure be wrong?
Before you answer that, fellow Jews (including you, Dad), let me just say that Ian and I were fairly certain that once we had kids, we would raise them with the same rules we were raised with, trying our best to sell that old chestnut (roasting on an open fire) that “eight nights are better than one,” and putting this tradition behind us until the kids went off to college, if not forever. It seemed easy enough to hide the evidence. I accidentally dropped an old-timey basket-of-cherries ornament, and it shattered into a powder so fine there was no trace it ever existed.
On the other hand, I started to wonder if it might be nice to teach children that holidays can be done à la carte. Every religion, every culture, has so many beautiful rituals and traditions. Maybe celebrating is a step toward tolerating. Maybe our family would ring in Hanukkwanzaa.
Or maybe I was rationalizing because I had become so intoxicated by the scent of pine needles and poinsettias that I couldn’t imagine life without them! Just as once you fly first class, it’s hard to go back to coach—once you have Christmas, it’s hard to go back to no Christmas.
That’s why we have the ornaments, the lights, the train, the stockings, and the giant inflatable lawn penguin (Ian’s idea, in case there was any question) in storage unit R3176. No No Noel has become a tradition for us, not instead of Hanukkah, but in addition. It’s no longer a novelty, but . . . we like it, okay?
And marriage, for better or worse, means you have a full-time, live-in enabler. That’s one of my favorite aspects of marriage, actually—the fact that your partner in life can be your partner in crime. Together, you can create new traditions, make your own rules, and break your own rules.
Christmas isn’t the only holiday Ian and I bent to our will. We started out, as most couples do, trying to alternate Thanksgivings between our families. One year we’d go to Dallas (where my sister and parents now live), the next we’d go to Pittsburgh (where Ian’s brother was doing his medical residency), and so on and so on—our plan until we had kids of our own, at which point people might finally come to us so
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