While her young daughter spins around to the Hanukkah dreidel song in another room, Christine Rubin describes how she expects to celebrate the holidays.
It is exactly two weeks before the holidays, and the family’s plans are set:
Christmas Eve she will attend a Lutheran church in Boulder for a traditional candlelight service with her husband, Ari, and their two children.
After the kids fall asleep, she and Ari will pile brightly wrapped gifts beneath their Christmas tree. In the morning, their children will open them, and later that day the family will feast on ham for Christmas dinner with Christine’s parents.
On Christmas night, the Rubins will light Hanukkah candles. Ari will recite the ancient prayers in Hebrew, and the family will play the dreidel game. They’ll fry potato pancakes, then they’ll each open one gift for the first night of Hanukkah, the eight-day Jewish festival of lights.
Christine is Lutheran. Ari is Jewish. The two attend Stepping Stones to a Jewish Me, a program at the Jewish Community Center in Boulder for interfaith families.
Even though the program encourages couples to choose one faith for their families – typically Judaism – the Rubins say that for now they will practice both.
“It’s a struggle every day to decide what we are going to do as a family,” says Christine, 36. “I do believe it’s confusing to our children to do both. On the other hand, both Ari and I are committed to our beliefs.”
Two in one this year
This year is especially challenging for the Rubins and other interfaith families commemorating Jewish and Christian traditions because the first night of Hanukkah falls on Christmas Day.
Although those who counsel interfaith couples disagree whether one religion should be chosen for the family or whether both can be practiced, all say it’s important to talk about the issues and to respect each other’s beliefs and traditions.
“Couples need to remember around this time that they love each other and remember what brought them together,” says Barbara Gould, a social worker who works as a part-time outreach coordinator for Boulder’s reform synagogue Congregation Har HaShem. “Use this as a time to be together as a family and to deal with whatever conflicts come up.”
Gould, a practicing Jew who is also in an interfaith marriage, does not advocate celebrating both holidays but says she will support couples who feel that’s the right decision for them.
It was easy to deal with the holidays at the beginning of their marriage, the Rubins say. Both worked demanding jobs – Christine was a television journalist and Ari worked in hotel sales – and they never put up a Christmas tree or lit Hanukkah candles. But the two say they couldn’t avoid the issue after their second child, Elan, now 8 months, was born, and their older daughter, Lila, 4, began asking questions about the holidays. Christine quit her high-powered job and teaches one journalism course at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Last year she put up a Christmas tree for the first time.
“Once we started having kids, we started thinking back to our own childhood and how important those traditions were,” says Christine. “We didn’t want our kids to be without traditions.”
For Ari, though, this time of year has become problematic. “It all of a sudden becomes difficult when your kids ask, ‘Is Jesus the son of God?”‘ Ari, 36, says. “How do you answer? I don’t have an answer for it. We have been doing one day at a time. There isn’t any black-and-white answer.”
For Nancy and Troy Seguin it was just a matter of talking about the holidays. Nancy, who was brought up in a reform Jewish home, didn’t want Nativity scenes or crosses in the house; it turned out it wasn’t an issue, because Troy, who was brought up Baptist, wasn’t comfortable with those symbols either. Nancy says she’s comfortable with having a Christmas tree or visiting Santa, and Troy says the tree was important to him, although some years they are just too busy to put it up.
“Just getting the subject on the table was really hard, and (there was) the fear of thinking you can’t have your own way,” Nancy, 33, says. “The main thing is to feel satisfied with your religious needs.”
Schooling decisions
Nancy acknowledges that things might get more difficult when it comes time to decide on religious schooling for their son, Delaney, age 8 months.
For now the two give small gifts at Christmas and Hanukkah. They belong to both a church and a synagogue. Christmas is spent at Troy’s parents’ home in Baton Rouge. La.; the two usually light the Hanukkah candles every night at their own home, although this year they will spend the first night away. And in a reversal of roles, Troy always sets up the menorah, and Nancy makes the pecan pies, a longtime Christmas favorite for Troy, and brings them to his parents’ home. But before they leave for Baton Rouge, they bring out their china and have their own special Christmas celebration meal. Then they give each other their one and only Christmas gift. On Hanukkah they will give one small gift to each other each night.
And both are learning about each other’s religions. Troy, who grew up in Louisiana, says that after learning it was traditional to make doughnuts on Hanukkah, he began incorporating his tradition of making beignets into the holiday.
“I am totally comfortable with the way we do it,” Troy, 31, says. “We just come up with new traditions on our own.”
For couples who decide to celebrate both holidays
- Try to sort out what is a religious obligation from what’s nostalgia.
- Don’t expect one spouse to cook and make the domestic arrangements for both holidays.
- Recognize it doesn’t have to be perfect.
- Be clear with grandparents that you are not going to reject them, but also let them know what practices are or not permitted in your home, such as giving children religious objects.
SOURCE: Mary Rosembaum, executive director of the Dovetail Institute for Interfaith Family Resources, based in Boston, Ky.
Eight ways to make Hanukkah more meaningful
- Share a personal miracle large or small from the past year.
- Invite friends to your home to create community.
- Connect with a Jewish community event.
- Give tzedakah (charity) instead of gifts.
- Do a family project to repair the world, such as volunteering at a homeless shelter.
- Commit to an ongoing project as a family to bring more light into the world
- Think about heroes and heroines in the Torah. What does it mean to stand up for what you are? When have you done this?
- Bonus: Spend a night of Hanukkah with non-Jewish friends and share rituals and traditions.
SOURCE: Deb Dusansky Kornfeld, director of Stepping Stones to a Jewish Me in Boulder
