A sensible Jewish parent explains Christmas

F

Fraggle Rocker

Staff member
from today's Washington Post:
When my daughter was four years old, we were shopping at one of the large malls during the height of the holiday season. It was festooned in full Christmas regalia. My daughter was looking around with delight and excitement at all the beautiful decorations when she stopped abruptly in her tracks and shut her eyes.

"I can't look at this stuff," she said sadly. "We're Jewish."

I explained to her that it was like going to a birthday party: Even when it's not your birthday, you can enjoy the cake and ice cream. She looked so relieved; she promptly opened her eyes and greatly enjoyed the lovely setting for the rest of our shopping trip.

--Randi Weil
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Many Jewish parents have responded to Christmas madness by trying to invent Channukah madness. Channukah is arguably the most festive of the Jewish holidays, but the Jewish holidays are a sombre lot. Many of them commemorate the Jewish people's survival of a tragedy or simply remind them to be more pious and humble. I have no doubt that in a generation or two the Holocaust will have its own holiday. Jewish holidays are really not meant to be "celebrated" in our sense of the word.

Christian holidays have lately become causes for raucous commercialism. This is understandable. Christendom was for centuries a community of endemic poverty. Its taboos against sanitation, literacy and profitable enterprise generated a thousand years of ignorance, plague and squalor known as the Dark Ages. Christian people have a lot of happiness and gaiety to catch up on.

The Jews have always promoted sanitation, literacy and profitable enterprise. Christians had to resort to the vilest acts of discrimination to keep the Jewish communities in their midst from becoming beacons of health, wisdom and prosperity to their suffering children.

In particular Christians had to live with the hypocrisy of concentrating their capital into the shtetls. Like Muslims, for centuries they intepreted the biblical admonishment against what is commonly translated as "usury" to mean any borrowing and loaning of money for interest. In a proper economy this practice benefits both borrower and lender and is one of the strongest engines for the creation of the surplus--or "capital"--that increases prosperity over the generations. Therefore they were forced to encourage the Jews to go into the banking business, and watch as the principles of Economics 101A strengthened the Jewish community.

The Jews came to be stereotyped as literally "rolling in money," because it was only an exaggeration of reality. The Jews did not need to turn their holidays into excuses to exchange money, because their communities had a viable economy year-round. With this history, there is no strong motivation to turn Channukah into a celebration of spending as there is with Christmas.

In the long run I suspect that the commericalization of Channukah will fade away. The Jews will continue keeping their holiday in their own traditional way, and they will be at peace with watching the Christians go crazy and put a Christmas tree on every flat surface. They'll even accept the invitation to the globe-spanning Christmas party and enjoy the food.

And those who are bitching will be encouraged by the wiser among them to shut up.
 
I'm not a Christian but I'll be dammed If I don't celebrate Christmas! The shit is just way to fun. Plus it's a Kids holiday. Nothing makes Kids happier then opening up presents on Chirstmas Day:)
 
Fraggle Rocker said:
I have no doubt that in a generation or two the Holocaust will have its own holiday. Jewish holidays are really not meant to be "celebrated" in our sense of the word.
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I want a national holiday to mourn the Chinese coolies that were brought to America and worked like defacto slaves.

And I also want a national holiday to mourn the Irish were experienced great discrimination in the early American times.

And I also want a national holiday to honor the Japanese who were put in concentration camps during world war 2.

And I want a holiday to honor the American-Germans who faced great discrimination during world war 2.

I also want a holiday to honor the 30 million Christians that were killed by the Bolshevics in Russia.

Can someone please provide a list of every victim group we have on record starting from 5,000 years ago when recorded history was initiated? I want all of them to have their own American National Holiday. In fact, if there are too many, then multiple victim groups will have to share the same days.

By the way, what is the difference between a sensible Jew and a non-sensible Jew?

Also, what is the difference between a Jewish commentary and a Gentile commentary?

Regards :)
 
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The Devil Inside said:
:) im jewish.
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Are you Ashkenazi or Shephadic or Oriental? Also, what exactly is an oriental Jew? And those african and indian jews, do you think they are pure for the most part and show the same Jewish genetic markers as the ashkenazi and shephardic? Or did they interbreed too much to be still considered Jewish?

I'm pure Chinese, as far as I know. I wish I was Ashkenazi, I want to be on the winning team :D
 
The Chinese coolies that came to America and worked like defacto slaves came here on their own free will, as I'm sure you did too.

I have no idea what he means by "Oriental Jew"? There's no such thing.
 
Charles_Wong said:
I want a national holiday to mourn the Chinese coolies. . . . the Irish. . . . the Japanese. . . . Can someone please provide a list of every victim group we have on record starting from 5,000 years ago when recorded history was initiated? I want all of them to have their own American National Holiday.
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Huh? Perhaps I didn't express myself well. The Jewish calendar (which, like the traditional Chinese lunar calendar, is on a different cycle) has a number of holidays listed, like Yom Kippur and Channukah, but they are only observed within the Jewish community. They are not national holidays, except in Israel. I did not mean to imply that Shoah ("Holocaust") would become an American national holiday, just a Jewish holiday.
By the way, what is the difference between a sensible Jew and a non-sensible Jew?
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The same as the difference between a sensible and foolish person of any other type. Generally, as judged by the person making the statement. There was a big news story a day or two ago about a rabbi complaining about all the Christmas trees in the Seattle airport. Resources and space were not available to put up decorations for Channukah, Kwanzaa, Saturnalia, and every other culture's name for the winter solstice festival, so the airport authority actually took down all the Christmas decorations. I was holding that rabbi up as a "foolish Jew," not because he was Jewish but because he was a fool. However, it turns out that he did not file a formal complaint but the bureaucrats acted out of fear, and he is beside himself with embarrassment that his comment triggered this action. The real fools are the government bureaucrats. Well duh, that's not really news.

Still, I hold up the mother who made the analogy between Christmas and someone else's birthday party as a sensible person who happens to be Jewish. In L.A. we all celebrated Cinco de Mayo and Chinese New Year, so why not Christmas too? Actually I lived in western Hollywood, which has a huge Jewish community, and all the Jewish holidays were big deals too. It was wonderful, there was always an excuse for some great ethnic food in L.A.

"Oriental Jew" is an old term for the Jews who still lived in the Middle East. Those were/are the ones whose ancestors never really participated in the Diaspora. As a result they ended up under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. Ironically by today's sensibilities, they were treated better there under the rule of Muslims than they generally were in Europe, especially Russia, Germany and Spain, under the rule of Christians.

Remember that in the Middle Ages China and Japan were so far away as to be mythical, so to Europeans the "Orient" was western Asia from Turkey to India.
 
"Stuff."



That certainly was the message of Christ.

If I wasn't so full of rage, I'd make an excellent vessel for the holy spirit.

But this time of year, it's just spirits.
 
The problem with your ramble is that if a Jewish holiday had become the gift giving holiday, then you could just as easily justify it by saying "Jews had more money as a mean and therefore were able to give more".

What you've established is a correlation, not a cause. Possible causes include that Judaism never became the mass-media and culture of a powerful nation before the last half century; that judaism has more strict definitions of their holidays (as does catholicism, but not protestantism or any of it's off-shoots); that Jews in Europe lived in squalor for the last 100 years, those years which the gift-giving tradition really formed during; because of no one identifiable key holiday judaism would never have developed this habit of such focus...

The list can go on quite a deal, and because we can't isolate the variables there's no way to know what the key factors were. But I'm willing to wager some of the ones I mentioned played a part.

As well - we jews do have a party holiday; it's called Purim.
 
Ganymede said:
I'm not a Christian but I'll be dammed If I don't celebrate Christmas! The shit is just way to fun. Plus it's a Kids holiday. Nothing makes Kids happier then opening up presents on Chirstmas Day:)
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as long as they keep the presents tradition with Christmas, I'll keep celebrating it:D
 
Why can't we start new celebrations not based on superstition or misery or 1 group of people? Why are people so stuck on traditions of which they know so little history & so anti anything new?
How about a Festival Of Life on the last weekend of the year and/or the 1st weekend of Spring?
How about federal law providing that each worker has a paid holiday for their birthday?
Annual nonpartisan No War Day which would be somber during war & a raucous celebration otherwise? Regardless of the reasons for the war or lack of it.
How about Modern Day celebrating our lives being better because of science & technology?
National Hero Day celebrating all those during the previous year who risked life or safety or gave enormously of themselves to help others?
Start a monthly tradition of giving something to someone less fortunate?
Communication day? Hugs Day? Pecan Pie Day? No Sugar Day? No Food Additives Day?
 
"I have no doubt that in a generation or two the Holocaust will have its own holiday."

Jews already do. It's called, 'Yom ha Shoa'
 
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