lights

I haven’t written about the holidays yet, have I? And here it is, the middle of Hannukah. Also Christmas Eve. Not to mention three days after the solstice, five days before my birthday, and eight days before the advent of the new year. Smack dab in the center of the winter holiday season.

We have a menorah with lovely multicolored candles, tall and delicate, which means I break more than I light, but hey. They’re pretty. I don’t know the prayer well. In fact, every year I have to ferret out the email I got when Damian was a baby and we celebrated for the first time, I have to print it out and read it (badly) from a wavering page. I’m good at lighting the candles, though. The ones I didn’t break, I mean. And I’m very good at watching them burn down in a dark room. Ghostly. Remembrance of a miracle of light that took place thousands of years ago, witnessed and celebrated by people whose blood flows in my veins, whose genes determine the color of my hair and the shape of my nose, whose sacrifices and struggles shape the fact of my existence.

We also have a fir tree with tiny white lights splashed like dewdrops all over the green along with red and gold balls we bought the first year we had a tree, that first year of Damian’s life, and other ornaments accumulated in the five years since: the silver icicles and stars my mom brought one year, the gold doves she brought another, the stuffed penguin on a sled we bought at a tacky but fun craft fair, the Pikachu with flashing lights someone gave us along the way, the elegant blue glass ball we acquired one year in Cambria, the trolley car we picked up in San Francisco, and more. A tree filled with memories and meaning, just the way we wanted it. On top, a star. Gold. With six points. A Star of David for a non-Christian tree.

We’re not a traditionally religious family (can you tell?). I’m Jewish by culture and ancestry and that suits me. I was raised to value my Jewishness while not actually knowing much of the rituals. That doesn’t suit me so well. I wish I knew more. I wish it felt more organic to my life. But I do like that I’ve never been forced into a box labeled with any particular religion and yet I’ve been given the awareness of a long, rich, and painful heritage. My son is fully Jewish by the tenets of the religion, but he’s also half Gentile. Dan is himself born of a Catholic father and a Protestant mother. Damian’s heritage is undefined, or maybe over-defined. A plethora of possible definitions. And so perhaps he can enjoy it all. His friend Corey doesn’t celebrate Christmas. His friend Jules doesn’t celebrate Hannukah. Damian celebrates both. It works for us.

The point, I think, is to celebrate the dark of winter, the coming of the light, the pleasure of my mother’s company, the holiday from work and school, the cyclical calendar shift from a waning old year to a waxing new year with its gift of possibility, anticipating the rotation of the earth and the newness of the approaching spring while we look back at the last year and contemplate what changed and what didn’t. Since my birthday falls just three days before New Year’s, I end up looking at my face in the mirror and contemplating my mortality, my regrets and achievements, hopes and fears. Mostly hopes, though, I’m an optimist.

Ultimately, it’s simpler to just look at the tiny lights on the tree in a dark room filled with holiday music, watch the candles burn down on the menorah, and sip a cup of tea with a spicy warmth that curls into my chest.

I like this season.

Posted by Tamar at December 24, 2003 04:52 PM