Holiday rituals, old and new, anchor us
The end of the year can feel like you’re sliding down a greased chute. From Thanksgiving onward, faster and faster you go with no chance of stopping.
In this season of enforced cheer, we can still find moments of peace in which we remember the ones we’ve lost, and the ones we hold tightly still. The rituals we adopt and adapt over time become our anchors amid the whirlwind.
After I wrote about feeling wistful that my twin sons might soon stop believing in Santa Claus, people told me that the concept may live on yet — and could take the form of being a secret Santa for a child in need or baking treats to share with neighbors, or a teenage son who still plays along, never too grown up to open his stocking on Christmas morning.
For this week and next, I’ve asked Bay Area authors to share the celebrations that define them.
As a child, Larry Rosen, who grew up in a secular Jewish family, had a fake Christmas tree and joined his Catholic neighbors for dinner on Dec. 25. Though they sometimes made the trek to Long Island for the major Jewish holidays of Passover and Rosh Hashanah, they didn’t dine on Hanukkah fare at their own home.
But now, his favorite custom is one he couldn’t have seen coming if he’d “had a hundred crystal balls.”
“My not-Jewish wife, who grew up in the shadow of a 12-foot Christmas tree, is a genius at making traditional Jewish food,” said Rosen, a San Francisco writer and host of the podcast “(Is it) Good for the Jews?”
His wife is self-taught, putting her own twist onto the classics, such as latkes made from potato and sweet potato. “Hanukkah means mountains of latkes, pans of kugel and even matzo ball soup, because why not? Safeway drags out the matzo display for every single Jewish holiday, why can’t we? And then, sure, a 12-foot Christmas tree; because what is interfaith life — or, more accurately, ‘interculture life’ — about if not a little give and take?”
Likewise, Laurie Ann Doyle’s holiday traditions reflect her family: Her roots are Irish and Protestant; her husband is Jewish, their adopted son Mexican American.
“For Hanukkah, we bring out my husband’s grandmother’s beautiful nickelplated menorah with the Torah depicted at its center and spin the dreidel his mother sent years ago,” said Doyle, Berkeley author of the short-story collection “World Gone Missing.”
Christmas Eve finds them at their favorite Chinese restaurant — a Jewish tradition because other types of restaurants usually weren’t open — which is always filled to overflowing. “There we’ve met Jews from Iran and South Africa, as well as many self-described Jewboos, or Jewish Buddhists, including a Zen priest,” she said.
Christmas morning, she makes a cinnamon coffee cake with her mother’s recipe. But the day’s big meal is tamales — a traditional Mexican Christmas dish — served steaming hot and accompanied by cilantro rice, black and pinto beans, and spicy hot sauce.
“For us, the holidays are about celebrating our diverse backgrounds,” Doyle said. “Given the current political climate, we believe this is more important than ever.”
Some traditions may date to your childhood, and others to when you make a family of your own. Every year, Elizabeth Stark, her wife and their children go to Sebastopol, where her father-in-law lives, to visit a Christmas tree farm.
“We always go late, in mid-December, after Grandpa returns from Mexico, and we are hunting for magic amid the scraps of what remains after others have dragged their choice trees away,” said Stark, host of the “Story Makers” podcast, and cofounder of Sonoma County Writers Camp. “The kids drag a red- or green-handled saw between the rows. Between last year’s stumps and next year’s offerings, red ribbons flag the available trees. Some are too short, some too tall, some wildly uneven, too sparse or too full. Finally, the kids begin to saw, lying on the ground to get to the base of the tree, Grandpa directing,” she said.
“These ordinary rituals and their accumulation over years still astonishes me. Eleven years ago, we seemed to be inventing our family from scratch. Both of us pregnant, a secular Jew and a lapsed Catholic, our marriage not yet a legal option, giving birth four months apart to ‘San Francisco twins.’ Now, in the shack of a shop, while they wrap our tree in something that resembles a hairnet, Nana buys the kids hot chocolate. Then, tree strapped to the top of our car, we drive home, shedding needles along the road.”
“What life — or is ... interfaith ‘interculture life’ — about if not a little give and take?” Larry Rosen, writer, podcast host