The Dybbuk of Christmas Past

By Matthew Kassel Christmas doesn’t mean much to me anymore, though for the first ten years of my life, it was my favorite holiday. Pretty standard, even for a Jewish child, to be drawn in with eager spirit by that yuletide festivity. But you might wonder: why only ten years? In my fourth year of elementary school, my parents decided that our family would stop celebrating Christmas, and that abrupt halt, to me, signaled the end of an era. Why were we, a secular Jewish family, celebrating this holiday in the first place? Well, as a child, my mom adored Christmas; she celebrated the holiday every year with her paternal grandmother. (My grandfather, her dad, converted to Judaism for my grandmother, a child of Depression-era Brownsville.) Growing up, my mom was drawn in by the whole Christian aesthetic—not...

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O Come, All Ye Chosen

Mid-November means that it's officially pumpkin spice latte and peppermint mocha season at Starbucks. (What, you don't measure time by the seasonal offerings of national coffee chains? You don't know what you're missing.) That also means that it's time for the Starbucks holiday cups, those red, snowflake-bedecked beacons of wintry tidings. A Moment employee who spends many of her non-working hours lugging her laptop from one DC Starbucks to another, dismayed that the cups teetered into Christmas territory, sent the following email to Starbucks: I love the seasonal coffee cups - when I was at school in Boston it made the winters a little more festive, and red is admittedly my favorite color. But I was wondering if you've ever considered doing a Hanukkah themed cup - maybe in metropolitan areas where there are large Jewish...

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My First Christmas, Again

by Steven Philp This past Saturday my family sat around the Christmas tree to unwrap presents. We have a particular system when it comes to opening gifts; it takes careful timing and distribution to make sure that each person has something to open, that no one runs out of presents before anyone else. However, this year my pile was conspicuously small. The thing is, I had already opened most of my gifts earlier that month when my mother sent me a few things for Hanukkah. We had saved a few so that I wouldn’t be left out of the festivities. Yet, this was my first Christmas as a rabbi-certified Jew-by-choice; I was bound to be a little out of place. While most Jews spend December 25th eating Chinese food with their friends and families, there are a...

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An Interest in Hanukkah? Jon Stewart Sings!

By Mandy Katz "Can I Interest You in Hanukkah?" may be the first ever TV ditty sung a due by Jon Stewart and fellow faux-newsie Stephen Colbert. It's part of Colbert's upcoming TV special, A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All, airing Sunday on Comedy Central. Audio of the duet aired yesterday on National Public Radio's Fresh Air — you can hear it on the show's website (click "Listen Now" and skip to minute 7:07). Sample lyric: "Yes, indeed, 8 days of presents, which means one nice one, then a week of dreck." Colbert, the show's host and self-described "broadcasting legend," also sings his own original carols. After all, the crusty newsman explains, perched on a piano bench in a cozy cardigan sweater, every time we hear one of those other, familiar, Yuletide standards, "someone else...

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