By: Rachael-Rothman Kerr The winter holidays are hectic for everyone, and when your family is celebrating more than one of them, there is a little extra balancing that’s needed to keep the holiday season happy. Christmas is still relatively new to me, and it is a lot more stressful for me than Han...

By: Rachael-Rothman Kerr

The winter holidays are hectic for everyone, and when your family is celebrating more than one of them, there is a little extra balancing that’s needed to keep the holiday season happy.

Christmas is still relatively new to me, and it is a lot more stressful for me than Hanukkah ever has been; since we’ve had kids, my husband and I have tried to find a balance that honors both traditions, and keeps the kiddos from becoming present-hungry monsters. It’s still a work in progress, but we have gotten pretty good at it over the years, and we have embraced the Chrismukkah season for the beautiful, crazy thing it is.

From our inter-faith family to yours, a holiday primer:

The Big (Guy) Issue is, as you may guess, The Man In Red himself, Chris Kringle. While we can’t stop the endless parade of strangers from asking our girls what they want from Santa, we have been very clear that the presents under the tree come from family and friends, and have done our best to discourage family members from talking about Santa Claus from the time our kids were very little.

We have also made sure to teach them the sacred duty of every Jewish child: do not disenchant your Christian friends of their belief in Santa Claus. Keeping that bit of magic in Christmas for our friends has been the seasonal job of Jewish kids since public school was invented, and it is serious business, especially as kids reach the age where they start asking each other seriously, “Do you believe in Santa?”

My nine year old needed a refresher course recently after two friends brought up the subject, and she told me her first instinct was to challenge her friend who was on the fence about St. Nick to explain his existence logically. After I reminded her of the importance of our Santa related secrecy, she nodded seriously and recommitted to the Claus cause.

The omnipresence of Christmas is a challenge for Jewish kids. Christmas is everywhere, from the day after Halloween—and increasingly, for some reason—before it, and sometimes, there might be one or two Hanukkah decorations, or a solitary book featuring a menorah among the aisles and aisles of tinsel, lights, and lawn decorations. Honestly, even as an adult, it’s a bummer. It would be easy for Christmas to overshadow Hanukkah, so we have made conscious steps to make sure Hanukkah gets its time to shine, too.

In recent years, more often than not, the two holidays have overlapped, so in those years, we decorate our Christmas tree with blue, white, and silver. We have a Happy Hanukkah sign above our stockings. We have lights shaped like dreidels and menorahs, and a Star of David for the top of the tree. It’s a Chrismukkah tree. Underneath it, though, are only Christmas presents. Hanukkah gifts are carefully kept separate, so that they, and the holiday, and our Jewishness, remain special and do not get subsumed by Christmas.

Despite the extra care needed to maintain Hanukkah’s uniqueness, the overlap is nice, actually, as it allows us to condense the gift-giving portion of the season into a smaller space, when Hanukkah is early, it stretches it out in a way that when the kids are little, they start to think that they should be getting gifts every day of the month. This means hiding away the Christmas presents an extra long time, to avoid tempting curious little hands, and also explaining that today is not an “opening presents” day, daily, until Christmas Eve.

We have also trial-and-over-spent our way to a balanced gift-giving approach. Each holiday gets one “big” present, and the rest are smaller, including the obligatory new outfit, and, in our family, the “Hanukkah Art Kit”, a tradition unknowingly started by my parents, who would give my sister and I a new plastic case of crayons, colored pencils, markers, and paints every year.

The socks get stuffed in the stockings.

Maintaining each holiday’s specialness is important to us, and one way that they both differ greatly and have a lot in common is the significance of food. We get them involved in making latkes and jelly doughnuts for several nights of Hanukkah, and they help in the kitchen preparing side dishes for Christmas dinner at my in-laws. Like with a lot of Jewish holidays, the food is really important to Hanukkah, so while we cook, we talk about why we cook with oil, and they learn family history in the kitchen with their grandparents at Christmas.

The first Hanukkah that my husband spent with my family, he surprised us all by singing along with the prayer as we lit the menorah; he had spent some time on YouTube, learning the words. I knew then that he was a keeper, and ever since, lighting the menorah has been a little extra special, even before we had kids, and even when we weren’t with my family (all eight nights are hard to do). We have made sure that the ritual of lighting the menorah has become special for our kids as well, they get to help put the candles in, and with some help, they take turns lighting them. We guide them through the prayers, and make sure to tell them they’ve done a good job, and try to gently enforce a quiet moment before they run off to play or choose a present.

Though getting through two holidays, and splitting time between two sides of the family, makes for an often hectic, and sometimes stressful December, the new traditions that we’ve made as a family, and that our interfaith friends and family have shared with us, are truly a source of holiday joy for me.