At first it seemed normal to Michelle Gompertz to be sitting in an Indian restaurant listing to Kenny G recordings of pop Christmas carols.<\/p>\n\n
Then she grew disoriented. This Indian restaurant was in New Deli. She was surrounded by Hindu culture, but nobody thought twice about listening to the same holiday saxophone Muzak that would be playing in American shopping malls.<\/p>\n\n
\u201cI knew that Christmas was everywhere. But it really hit me,\u201d said Gompertz, the daughter of a United Church of Christ pastor in Indiana. \u201cI remember thinking, \u2018Where are we? What season is this, anyway?\u2019 \u201c<\/p>\n\n
She remembered that scene after she married a Jewish New Yorker and started planning holiday festivities in the San Francisco Bay area. It seemed like all of their close friends shared a common bond \u2014 one spouse was Christian and the other Jewish.<\/p>\n\n
What kind of decorations should they use? What songs were they supposed to sing and what songs were they supposed to avoid? When you live in one of America\u2019s 2.5 million Jewish-Christian households, what season is this?<\/p>\n\n
\u201cEverybody knows that what you\u2019re supposed to say is \u2018Happy Holidays\u2019 and leave it at that,\u201d said Ron Gompertz. \u201cBut when you\u2019re in an interfaith family it\u2019s more than that. It\u2019s kind of Hanukkah and it\u2019s kind of Christmas.<\/p>\n\n
\u201cWhen I was a kid we tried calling it \u2018Hanumas.\u2019 On \u2018Seinfeld\u2019 they came up with \u2018Festivas,\u2019 but that wasn\u2019t right either.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
Then Ron and Michelle Gompertz watched the 2003 episode of the hip teen soap \u201cThe O.C.\u201d in which anti-hero Seth Cohen explained the holiday ground rules in his interfaith family. This was a season about having it all \u2014 all the parties, all the gifts, all the music. And the name of this season was \u201cChrismukkah.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
\u201cAll you had to do was say that two or three times \u2014 Chrismukkah \u2014 and it just sounded right,\u201d said Ron Gompertz, who now lives in Montana with his wife and daughter.<\/p>\n\n
The Gompertz clan made some cards for family and friends and claimed the rights to the www.Chrismukkah.com domain. This year, they hired a designer and jumped into the marketplace with \u201cOy Joy\u201d and \u201cMerry Mazeltov\u201d cards and gifts, with images ranging from an Orthodox Jewish Santa to a reindeer with antlers that hold menorah candles.<\/p>\n\n
What precisely is \u201cChrismukkah\u201d? Their press materials call it a secular, \u201chybrid holiday\u201d that begins with the eight-day Hanukkah season and extends through Christmas. This year, the Jewish \u201cFestival of Lights\u201d begins at sundown on Dec. 7.<\/p>\n\n
The Chrismukkah franchise is not alone. A company called MixedBlessing has marketed interfaith cards for 15 years and Hallmark Cards Inc. now has four holiday offerings blending Jewish and Christian themes. A typical American Greetings Corp. \u201cMerry Hanukkah\u201d card shows a Jewish Santa inspiring his sleigh team with the cry: \u201cOn Isaac! On Izzy! On Eli! On Abe! On Levi! On Morty! On Shlomo! On Gabe!\u201d<\/p>\n\n
The problem with the \u201cOy to the World\u201d punch lines is that, for many Jewish and Christian leaders, interfaith marriage isn\u2019t funny. During the past generation or so, nearly half of American Jews have married outside the faith. About a third of the children of intermarried couples are being raised as Jews.<\/p>\n\n
A new statement from the U.S. Catholic-Jewish Consultation Committee bluntly urges these parents to raise their children in one faith or the other. Attempting to raise children \u201csimultaneously as both \u2018Jewish\u2019 and \u2018Catholic\u2019 \u2026 can only lead to violation of the integrity of both religious traditions, at best, and, at worst, to syncretism,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n\n
The problem for mixed-marriage families such as his, said Rod Gompertz, is that \u201cThe Holidays\u201d have already been sliced, diced and secularized in the public square. Embracing \u201cChrismukkah\u201d merely goes one step further and \u201crecognizes the state of mind that we are already living in,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n
For millions of ordinary Americans, this is a season about Frosty the Snowman, shopping bags, Bing Crosby, twinkle lights and the whole mass-media experience. Thus, \u201cChrismukkah\u201d isn\u2019t religious. It isn\u2019t the real Christmas or the real Hanukkah, he said.<\/p>\n\n
\u201cHow are we supposed to balance what are actually fundamentally incompatible holidays? Our solution is to focus on the fun parts that we can enjoy without getting into all that theology.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At first it seemed normal to Michelle Gompertz to be sitting in an Indian restaurant listing to Kenny G recordings of pop Christmas carols. Then she grew disoriented. This Indian restaurant was in New Deli. She was surrounded by Hindu culture, but nobody thought twice about listening to the same holiday saxophone Muzak that would […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":610,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[206,254,415,430,1538,666],"class_list":["post-1309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-christmas","tag-commercialism","tag-hanukkah","tag-holidays","tag-judaism","tag-pop-culture"],"yoast_head":"\n