"It's a standard trope in portrayals of assimilated Jews to open with a scene built around a Christmas tree. That's how Tom Stoppard's " Leopoldstadt" and Alfred Uhry's " Last Night of Ballyhoo" begin, and also Ian Buruma's memoir about his grandparents, " Their Promised Land." The idea is, as soon as you show that, you've got the audience's full attention, especially if it's a Jewish audience, because it's so peculiar."
"When I was growing up, the idea that it was peculiar wouldn't have occurred to me—all the Jews in New Orleans, at least the ones we knew, celebrated Christmas, though our family did so a little more enthusiastically than the others. Weeks in advance, we would choose our tree, haul carefully preserved boxes of beautiful and fragile ornaments out of the attic, summon an attitude of mixed reverence and joy for trimming the tree, and place wreaths and other decorations around the house."
"On Christmas Eve, we would sing the standard carols and my father would solemnly read out loud Clement Clarke Moore's poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas." On Christmas morning my sister and I would arise at dawn and sit impatiently in front of the tree, waiting to open dozens of presents that had come in from across the Lemann family's expanse of relatives, friends, and law-firm clients."
Assimilated German-Jewish families in the American South adopted Christian seasonal customs as central family rituals. They selected and trimmed evergreen trees, preserved fragile ornaments, sang standard carols, and read "A Visit from St. Nicholas." Christmas mornings featured numerous presents from a wide social network and occasionally unkosher main courses like roast suckling pig. Generational cultural tastes diverged, with fathers favoring Victorian novelists and mothers owning midcentury Jewish-American novels. Those assimilationist practices fostered a confident integrated identity and helped render the Holocaust remote or unimaginable, prompting some families to minimize or shut out its reality.
Read at The New Yorker
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