Letters to the Editor
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Except people eat chickens ...
It's neat to see creativity and freedom to create your own holiday. One issue:
I forsee a day when the kids look at their chicken soup and dumplings and say "is this Irving's relative?". OK, I raise chickens and we eat chickens so we have to deal with this sort of thing a lot: some chickens are pets, and some are food.
But a rooster who gives presents is completely removed from the reality of a "real" chicken, in the way that Bambi just isn't related to any real deer. Roosters, from the kid's point of view, are rather mean and noisy, protective of their territory and don't lay eggs.
The second issue is: the Christmas tree, lights, the date, and mistletoe are NOT basically "Christian", they are pagan, and all about the shortest day of the year. Which does, in fact, exist, no matter what your belief system is. Jewish, Christian, or Nerd, this is a dark cold time of the year. Unless you live below the Equator! I expect in Jerusalem, there isn't much die-back in winter. Here though, the evergreens are what LIVES in winter, and THAT is a magic of itself. Everything is dead: but not the "Christmas trees".
Anyway, I love our celebration, as do the kids. It's dark and cold out, and we have our lights and tree and presents. I try to get our kids as involved in the real landscape ... the earth, the sky, the sun, the moon, the animals, the berries we pick and eat. They get plenty of "CRT landscape" too, via the TV and the computer, but at the root of it, it's still the physical world that sustains our culture (even if you live in the city). There's plenty of magic in this world, and plenty of room to add more. For us though, I'd prefer it to be based on something they don't have to "grow out of" when they learn the truth about chickens.
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Can you really not not that the Christmas tree is really a solstice tree?
All our traditions except St. Nick are straight out of pagan Rome. The evergreen trees and wreaths, extra lights, gifts, and drinking too much. Why not just celebrate the solstice? I hope you are exaggerating about your wife's tyranny just to be funny, because otherwise I feel very sorry for you. It seems completely unfair to me that she can't accept a few purely pagan traditions as part of your spiritual and emotional reality, when you are going out of your way to accept hers on a daily basis. I am not terribly passionate about Christmas myself, and in fact I hate the whole Santa Project. But Santa was a very important part of my husband's emotional life during childhood, and I respect that intellectually even though I don't understand it. So we are doing the Santa thing with our kids. That's a compromise. You know, that thing people who love each other do sometimes. Maybe you should go back to Quaker meeting. Then next time, instead of going to a Jewish therapist, you can just request a clearness committee. Things tend to turn out fairly after the Quakers get involved - even if it takes a reeeeeeally long time.
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Terry Pratchett's Hogfather
As another alternative, you can have a non-Christian winter celebration and still have a big fat guy in a sleigh who dishes out presents. The sleigh is pulled by hogs, with names like gouger and rooter, and for kids who haven't been good he leaves a bag of bloody bones, but all of that just makes him more awe-inspiring than our currently watered down, bland and insipid commercial Santa. For extra fun, when the big guy goes missing, another anthropomorphic personification, Death, has to fill in for him. HO HO HO. Pratchett's an atheist, but I think his fables are suitable for all, including Christians. Ideal for "interfaith" families, perhaps.
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Buck Buck Squawk!
This item made me CACKLE! It was egg-siting to read such an article.
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I Love the Chicken but...
I'm a non-practicing Jew (from my mother's side, of course) and although I have literally nothing to do with the Christian aspects of Christmas, I love the family togetherness and magic and gift giving that are involved in the holiday. I have a small tree my mom no longer wanted, and I don't put a star at the top -- I have snowmen. I decorate with snowflakes and santas and candycanes, and have my menorahs sitting out as well. AND all of my (practicing) Jewish relatives celebrate Christmas as well.
Other posters are right -- Noxon hasn't created an interfaith holiday, he's had to work around his wife's complete inability to compromise. As far as I'm concerned if the kids are going to Hebrew school and being raised Jewish, celebrating Christmas isn't going to taint them. Although frankly he really should have known what he was getting into when his mother-in-law complained about him having the word "Christ" in his name. I'm shocked his wife managed to get away with marrying a non-Jew at all!
I LOVE the chicken though and all the elaborate get-up with the backstory, feathers, etc. Picturing pants filled with presents makes me smile.
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Odd
Chanuka - that most secular of minor Jewish holidays before the 20th Century needs to be watered down even more in order to be accepted? Why even bother? You can make Chanuka pretty much as non denominational as you like and take away little from it. It's not as if some Syrian-Roman pagans are going to protest you.
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Dashing through the snow to make my daughter believe...
Oh that Irving the Snow Chicken. Hannukah Harry can't hold a candle to him. As one of the Hebrew faith who is pushed out each X-mas eve into the snowy cold by my Goyisha In-laws with a boot and some jingle-jangley bells to dash quickly across the lawn saying "ho ho ho" to amuse my barely-believing eight year old daughter, I so appreciate the freshly baked mythology of Irving. We of the interfaithful who primarily want to raise kids with good values and some sense of spirituality, thank you.
By the way, Christopher Noxon is one of the foremost writers on post-modern parenting (and our own prolonged adolescences) we have and if you haven't, I recommend you treat yourself by visiting www.christophernoxon.com