Me and my makeshift menorah for this year's Hanukkah. It's definitely not made of bottles. | Photo by Marry Pivazian.
1997. Walking through the local Stop & Shop, my small mittened hand enclosed in my mother’s, I asked who the man in the red suit was. He loomed above me, plastic, beside a display of silver-and-gold-wrapped Hershey’s Kisses.
“That’s Santa Claus,” she said. “It’s a Christmas thing.”
I didn’t know who Santa Claus was, of course, because we celebrated Hanukkah at my house, and it was awesome. When December rolled around, my family asked one another what we wanted for Hanukkah. We lit candles and said a short blessing. My father would bless me and my siblings, placing his enormous hand on our foreheads one at a time, and spoke briefly in Hebrew. We exchanged small gifts–I always got books or colored pencils, my teenage sister Leah got CDs and spending money, and Nate, my older brother, got cooking supplies. We spoke about the story of Hanukkah, about survival and everlasting light and kickass Maccabee soldiers. We ate gold-wrapped chocolate coins and mountains of latkes (oh, latkes!). It was really nice, and it was all I needed. Since I went to an all-Jewish elementary school, Christmas was never really on my radar. When my Catholic cousins on my mother’s side talked about Christmas, it may as well have been in Cantonese.
I started public school in seventh grade. There, I met kids from all manner of cultures and religions–some Jewish kids like me, but also Christians, Buddhists, Catholics, Hmong, and Muslims, too. Suddenly December meant a whole lot more than candles and potato pancakes; it was a season to decorate, to sing cheery jingles, to wear themed sweaters and watch a whole new set of movies, even to listen to a whole new set of music. I started to notice all the Christmas-themed commercials, movies, TV shows…it went on and on, from Thanksgiving to New Year’s.
I didn’t like it.
Hanukkah was better! It wasn’t trying to be anything other than it was: a time to give gifts to your family, to eat fried potatoes and applesauce. I began to resent Christmas. Mentally, I trash talked the figure of Santa Claus: “He’s not even real. Who could possibly believe that some big fat guy could actually fit down a chimney? How could he make it to all the houses in the entire world in one night? More than that, how could he eat all of those cookies?” I relished the thought of disproving Santa’s existence, over and over again. The resentment got deeper, more mature. I began to hate the commercial aspect of the holiday, squinting angrily at the Coca-Cola polar bears frolicking in the snow (I still dislike that aspect of Christmas, but that’s beside the point).
But then, my new gentile friends at school were so excited. Going over to their houses after school, I’d stop short in the living room and stare at the bedecked tree. “Why would you ever do that? It’s shedding pine needles everywhere,” I’d think, and roll my eyes. I’d ask what Christmas was like and their eyes would light up. Stories of Christmas morning, I’ll admit, made me feel a twinge of what I now recognize as jealousy. I stuffed it down. I would not be defeated. Hanukkah was king!
My vendetta against Christmas continued until freshman year of high school. That’s when I met my friend Allegra and saw what Christmas really was.
My friend, Allegra, also known as Queen of Christmas. This is the door to her dorm room from the day after Thanksgiving break right up until Christmas. | Photo by Sharon Weissburg.
Allegra was, and remains to this day, queen of Christmas. The day after we got back from Christmas break she was proudly wearing her Christmas sweater (which was, admittedly, magnificent) with a red skirt and green tights. She may as well have had tinsel in her hair for every day of December. She sang Christmas songs day in and day out, and her family had a big holiday party every year and invited all the neighborhood families to rejoice.
By then, I may as well have been a cynical old maid as far as Christmas was concerned. Allegra invited me to her house one evening for the aforementioned Christmas party. I heaved a sigh of cynical anticipation. I arrived bearing blue-sprinkled shortbread Hanukkah cookies in the shapes of dreidels and menorahs. I knocked on the door and heaved one more exasperated sigh. This was going to be a long night.
It was wonderful.
Never in my life had I seen such cheer in a room. The house, ordinarily perfectly lovely, was positively luminous with string lights, both white and multi-colored. An enormous, lush tree sat in the corner where the television had been moved aside to accommodate it, absolutely covered in tinsel and ornaments both classic and personal. All of my friends from school were there, and they were as excited as Allegra. It was infectious. Suddenly, I got it.
I understood that the holiday season is for everyone, and that Christmas, despite its obnoxious commercial crap, brings everyone together. I suddenly got the tingle in the blood that the sound of jingle bells provokes, and the sharp, special beauty of the smell of pine needles inside the home. The songs started to make me happy, and I gleefully accepted tree-shaped cookies. I learned about fruitcake, and lumps of coal, and A Charlie Brown Christmas (maybe my favorite out of all these). Childlike wonder grew rather than waned within me as I began to taste adulthood. I still loved Hanukkah (still do!) for the same reasons I always did, but suddenly there was room in my heart for Christmas, too.
This year, my friends and I did a Secret Santa gift exchange. It was just going to be a simple night of ordering pizza and exchanging little presents within our ten-dollar limit. Sitting in my room, my suite mate, Marry (one of The Quad‘s own talented writer/photographers!) said absentmindedly, “I wish we had a tree to put the presents under.”
My first Christmas tree ever, made of my plastic tower fan, a green towel, and a broken umbrella. Photo by Sharon Weissburg.
Suddenly, another one of my suite mates, Sami, exclaimed, “I have a green towel! We can use your fan!” and ran out of the room. She rushed back in at top speed and draped it over my white plastic tower fan. We gasped. It almost looked like a little tree. Sami opened her umbrella under the draped towel, making it fan out like a young pine. Soon all of my suite mates were giggling and sticking things onto the towel-tree: pins, earrings, photographs, necklaces! We nestled a teddy bear under the lower “branches.” Soon, it became a friendship tree, too–we pinned something representative of each of our friends onto our little tree. Before long it was crowded with presents.
My first Christmas tree ever.
The evening was perfect. We sipped hot cocoa and exchanged thoughtful presents. We listened to Christmas songs by Andrea Bocelli and Elvis. We watched Toy Story. It was warm and wonderful, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Even in the middle of finals, it gave me a special evening to stop and think about how amazing my friends are–and, really, how lucky I am in general.
We made a menorah, too, out of bottles and electric tea lights. I and my friend Lizzie recited a Hanukkah blessing and switched six of the lights on. We played the Hanukkah song. When I go home, I firmly intend to light up an entire menorah full of candles (even though the holiday will technically be over by then) and make about four hundred latkes.
But I might just listen to some Christmas carols while I’m at it.
Sharon Weissburg (CAS 2015) hails from the lovely city of Providence, Rhode Island and loves fashion, literature, music, and art. She's a pretty big fan of pretzels dipped in marshmallow fluff, too.
