"There is a meme that circulates every holiday season, an image of a sign in a restaurant window. "The Chinese Restaurant Association of the United States would like to extend our thanks to the Jewish people," it says. "We do not completely understand your dietary customs ... but we are proud and grateful that your GOD insists you eat our food on Christmas." Is the sign real? Perhaps not; the fact-checking site Snopes found no evidence of the association even existing."
"Long before Jews came to the United States, some of them celebrated Christmas - participating in many of the cultural traditions, even as they avoided the religious part of the holiday. According to Jordan Chad, author of " Christmas in Yiddish Tradition," Jewish folklore about the holiday appears as early as the late 1300s. Plenty of Jewish communities in Europe spent Christmas Eve dancing and drinking, feasting and gambling - as many of their Christian neighbors did, when those neighbors were not in church."
"Like many minority groups, Jews have always created ways of adapting to the societies in which they live, but whose culture they do not totally share. And one thing that means is a collection of Christmas traditions, varying by time and place. Many of them came up in interviews for my book " Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in the United States.""
A popular meme links Chinese restaurants and Jews to the widespread custom of many American Jews eating Chinese food on Christmas, though the purported association cited in the meme appears fictional. Jews often create cultural adaptations when living in majority-Christian societies, producing varied Christmas-related customs. Jewish folklore about Christmas dates back to at least the late 1300s. In many European communities, people spent Christmas Eve dancing, drinking, feasting, and gambling while avoiding the holiday’s religious observance. Such practices grew from avoiding study on Christian holidays and evolved into celebrations of seasonal revelry rather than observance of Jesus’ birth.
Read at Fortune
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]