No Christmas Tree In MY Home

Here is a story that is funny but true. I hope you will appreciate the humor. America is wonderful!

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Last summer, out at Fire Island, we got togther for Saturday night dinner with our friends. These are mostly married couples in their 50s and 60s.

This particular night the topic of conversation turned towards religion (which is unusual for this crowd) and each was talking about some aspect of his or her religious history.

One of the couples is an inter-married Jewish husband and Chinese wife. She is actually from China. We got to somehow talking about Christmas. The wife, Celcelia, said that all her married life she had wanted to have a Christmas tree in the home for her children.
David, the husband, was adamantly against it and never allowed it.

I am the resident "religion expert" in the crowd, and so Cecelia asked me what I thought of all of this. She was pretty unhappy about not being able to have the Christmas tree. She said that essentially she was raised as Buddhist and does not have any Christian beliefs but she thinks that American kids have Christmas trees even if they are
not Christians.

I said to her something like, "Well Cecelia, the reason Dave doesn't allow the Christmas tree is that he is Mr. Jewy Jew-man, and he won't have a tree in December."

She responded to me, "But you know that David is not religious at all. In fact, he does not even know anything much about being Jewish."

I said, "Yeah, that's right. He doesn't. But one thing he DOES know is that once, a long time ago, he was circumcised, and the last time he looked, he was still circumcised, and he is afraid that if he lets you bring in that GOYISH tree to the home that his foreskin will grow back."

The humor was appreciated by most people there but lost on her. Oh she understood the words alright, and the concept, but she wasn't laughing.

Subsequent to that night I had a conversation with my friend Ed and asked him if he were married to a non-Jewish woman, specifically a woman even nominally Christian, and she wanted a Christmas tree in the home, would he object. He said he would not object and asked me how *I* felt about it. I told him that if I were married to, or living with, a Christian woman, even a nominal one, and she wanted to have a tree at Christmas, that I
would not object. We then discussed why we would not object when many a Jewish man would object, even though married to a Christian spouse.

And this is what we came up with.

When you have been through it all and abandoned it, what difference does it make? If you, a Jew, decided to marry a Christian woman, what's the problem? She will let you have objects and rituals of Jewish content in the home. How can you object?

A few weeks later, we went out to dinner with David and Cecelia, and the question was still bothering me. I asked David why, since he is married to a non-Jew who does not believe but who wants her children to have a Christmas tree, why he disallows it. I anticipated his reply. He said that the Christmas tree is the symbol of the European gentiles' oppression of the Jews. Yes, it's true that typically our grandparents told us that Christmas Eve was the time when many pogroms were perpertrated. But I said, we are now in a different century and in a different environment, one in which there are no pogroms, either at Christmas time or any other time, AND he, as a Jew, has married out of his ethnic group (I didn't say 'faith' because I don't think that acurately describes it since neither of them is religious).

Still, it is an irrational thing because so many Jews to whom I have told the story agree with him even though they themselves are not the slightest interested in expressing religiosity. But neither would they allow the non-Jewish spouse to express it.

My take is that they have not "lived through" their Jewishness in any essential way and so they must hang on to the little that they have lived through, even in a negative way, in a non-commital way.

I never had a Christmas tree. As a little boy, I wanted one but that was out of the question with my parents and their generation. I guess that now as an adult that has been thru several epiphanies, and knows them all to be straw, and as an enlightened American, who cares?

Comments anyone?