Adventures in holiday observing

When I was a scant five years old growing up in the city of Winnipeg, Canada, my father took a “leave of absence” from his university studies, which meant I could no longer stay in the school-owned daycare, and had to be transferred elsewhere. I eventually ended up at the John Dafoe Children’s Centre, the population of which was almost entirely Jewish.

As a blond-haired, blue-eyed Mennonite, I stood out a bit. So in December of that year my mother decided the two of us should begin celebrating Hanukkah in an effort to fit in with my peers. She went out and bought a shiny menorah, candles and a glossy paperback entitled The Hanukkah Book, filled with illustrated instructions on how to properly celebrate what, to us, was a brand new holiday.

For eight days, once I was home from daycare and she from medical school, we stood by the kitchen counter of her apartment and lit candles and struggled through phonetic Hebrew prayers. Such was the extent of our Hanukkah, and our newfound multiculturalism.

Come Christmas time, we bundled up for the drive to grandma and grandpa’s house in Blumenort (current population: 924), where college-aged uncles challenged me to Nintendo, a clock boomed the time every 15 minutes, and a sensible grandmother told me that everything, from shoes to cats, talked. A spry grandfather took me for a walk in the snow, and a traditional Christmas dinner was eschewed in favor of a gigantic banana-split buffet, eaten in the living room.

Not many Christmas Days since have been like that one. We stayed in the hospital next year, as my mother took holiday work shifts. Then I stayed with my father’s girlfriend who had two daughters, and a couple years later I stayed with a new one who had two sons. Then my mother, stepfather and I moved to America, and I looked outside the window, watched the rain pound and wondered how anybody celebrated Christmas without snow. One year, my mother and I celebrated Christmas dinner at a Denny’s before I flew out to visit my father, and finding it too funny, we called everyone we knew from our plastic booth.

The Christmases have changed, but the Hanukkahs haven’t. I’ve gone home to Eugene the last two Decembers to find the same old menorah on what’s now a much bigger kitchen counter. Its former shine has been eclipsed by 15 years of congealed wax, but it has traveled everywhere with us, and my stepsisters, who have now joined us in the land of the free, help my mom light the candles now that I’m gone.

Mom says she doesn’t try to light the candles in accordance with the actual days of Hanukkah anymore, which I thought disrespectful until I realized I’d never celebrated Christmas on Christmas Day, either (not to mention just the concept of goofy Canadian Mennonites celebrating Hanukkah for the heck of it). In a generation of splintered and soldered families, it’s neither possible nor desirable to gather everyone together at a single time, so our number of Christmases in the month multiplies. We adjust, we make do with this new world we have and this new idea of holiday, the meanings of which everybody seems to have an intellectual claim on these days.

Last Friday, I spent the afternoon downtown killing time before the tree lighting at Pioneer Square. I know, Black Friday’s supposed to be an evil emblem of consumerist culture, and we’re supposed to go for a bike ride or drink tea and catch up with our roommates instead. But I found I kind of liked it. Everybody was out in the frigid air, chatting and drinking coffee and dashing from store to store.

Sure, there were the expected white-knuckled, screaming neurotic yuppies. But there were also the laughing couples, the patient single moms and the excited teenagers, free after a day of family time–almost becoming a tradition itself, almost like a new American holiday, deserving of its own righteous name on the calendar (though I’m sure if I’d gone to Best Buy at four in the morning, my words would be far less affectionate).

In a place where Starbucks and Macy’s and Santa Claus sequels are making the holidays the same everywhere we go, I’m constantly amazed by the uniqueness that accompanies every person’s approach to this time of year–everyone with their own attitudes as people go home to their old traditions, and those that don’t begin to make up their own.

I couldn’t go home for Thanksgiving this year—my family decided to take it off and do other things. So I stayed in Portland to do the day with friends who were in the same boat, and I baked pies. I can’t bake. But I learned.

As the stress of vacations, gifts and the meaning of this month strain us to a breaking point, as our loved ones drift apart, as non-Christians feel isolated and cut off from our overbearing Christmas culture, we have to remember: These holidays are only what we make them.

My mother, stepfather and stepsiblings are all going back to Canada this Christmas. We haven’t been back to that corner of the world for the holidays since we left it ten years ago. The college-aged uncles now have kids of their own. The sensible grandmother is six years in her grave. The spry grandfather still takes walks in the snow, so I hear. I wonder if there’s still a banana-split buffet. If not, maybe I’ll pull out the ingredients myself, and make my own.

Good luck on finals, stay warm and have a genuinely wonderful holiday season in the best way you know how.