Where Will You Spend Thanksgiving and Christmas/Hanukkah? Non-Jewish families are often confronted with which spouse’s family will get them for Christmas. One solution is to flip back and forth for Thanksgiving and Christmas. For interfaith families the question of “who gets us?” can be, Thanksgiving with the Jewish family and Christmas with the Christian (or…
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I wrote the opinion piece for the J-Weekly because so many Jews told me they felt pressured to embrace Christmas. Please expand your idea of what other people “should” like. Growing up without a formal religion in the United States can lead many people to insist, “I have no religion. I’m certainly not a…
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A holiday season email from a non-Jewish guy came to my Mixed and Matched column: I love Christmas but my Jewish girlfriend won’t participate with me, and this is our first holiday season together. I’ve told her that Christmas isn’t really religious for me. The tree and Yule log are pagan originally; they have…
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Hanukkah and Christmas – the “December dilemma”. I never liked that term “dilemma”. Not that there isn’t an element of difficulty for an interfaith household, but the word made it seem so dire. I think I would prefer, December Questions, because it all boils down to a lot of questions. The core one being, how…
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Here come the holidays! I love warm colors. I prefer gold to silver, red to blue. So you can imagine how much I want to change up the “traditional” colors of Hanukkah. Years ago I bought some gorgeous gold and red Hanukkah wrapping paper at my synagogue’s gift shop. It hit me – I don’t…
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I have a friend who is a food writer and chef. She blogs about food and she writes a food column for the J-weekly (the San Francisco bay area Jewish newspaper). She called me a couple months ago as she was writing her December column to ask, “Is having Christmas and Hanukkah overlap fantastic for…
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