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Like many members of interfaith families, I get to observe the two holidays on the same day this year.
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Dan Saltzstein’s most memorable childhood Hanukkah gift was a New York Jets jersey. (He had asked for a Giants jersey.)
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When I was growing up, there was no Christmas tree, no ornaments, no goose or fruitcake. No, I’m not a member of the Cratchit family, I’m Jewish. Though I grew up largely secular, my family didn’t celebrate the Christian holiday in any way, except by touring the department store windows on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan a few times.
Like many Jews, we marked Christmas by going to the movies and eating Chinese food. On the holiday years ago, I went with my parents to see “Schindler’s List.” I can only imagine that the percentage of Jews in the audience was close to 100 percent. My dad got angry that people were eating popcorn on such a solemn occasion.
We did observe the eight days of Hanukkah, lighting candles on our charmingly severe wrought-iron menorah and exchanging gifts that, by day three or four, reached the level of tchotchkes.
That all changed when I married Nancy, a Catholic. I’ve got plenty of company: In a 2020 Pew Research Center study, 42 percent of all married Jewish respondents indicated they have a non-Jewish spouse; remove Orthodox Jews and, for those wed after 2010, the number spikes to 72 percent.
This year, us interfaith couples face a bit of a challenge. The Jewish calendar is based on the lunisolar cycle, which does not sync with the Gregorian one. So Hanukkah and Christmas rarely end up on the same dates. Roughly every 10 to 20 years, though, they do; 2024 is such a year, the first since 2005. (Jewish holidays start at sundown the night before their first day.)
