We make a left out of our apartment and walk on Sixth Avenue, where a wide selection of pine trees are available for purchase. “I want a Christmas tree,” says Ravi, my 4-year-old. “What’s Christmas?” I ask. “I don’t know,” Ravi says. “I like the lights.” Why shouldn’t she want a tree? Pine trees especially…
If you drive around my neighborhood in the Northern suburbs of Chicago, you can probably count on your two hands the number of homes with Christmas lights. I guess that’s my way of admitting I’m raising my kids in a bubble. My oldest son even acknowledged to me that he doesn’t have any Christian friends,…
I am a Jew by choice, I was raised a Muslim, and my mother is an ordained Baptist minister. One might think that I would encounter religious conflict with my family on all fronts. In fact, people are often incredulous at the ease with which I can navigate through these three Abrahamic faiths. Perhaps, because…
This year’s overlap of the Jewish and Gregorian calendars has landed Hanukkah directly on top of Christmas. While also inspiring many pithy mashup titles, this has helped illustrate a truth that undercuts one of the polite fictions of Jewish life in America: that Hanukkah would look anything like how we celebrate it today if Christmas…
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