First Comes Santa, Then Comes the Inquisition

by Joysa Winter At the age of 2 years and 5 months, my daughter responds to every new thing she sees as if she has just uncovered some long-lost mythical treasure. “Ohhhhh, Mommy, loooooooook!” she enthused the other day, while I was soaking in the bathtub, and she was playing nearby. “You have new razor!” I laughed. “Yes, Adiel, I do.” “It’s red! With a red button!” “Yes, it is.” “It hang up on the wall!!!!!!!!” This line was delivered with her hands clenched tight into fists, shaking them over her head in such excitement, you’d think she was 13 years old and Justin Bieber had just walked on stage. It is this kind of unbridled, barely-able-to-contain-myself enthusiasm that Adi has brought to the sudden appearance of Christmas decorations all over our suburban Philadelphia neighborhood. It started just after Halloween — a few white lights popping up in trees and on fences here and there — which she would point to, exclaiming: “Look, Mommy! Lights! Preeeeetty!” As the days turned into weeks and Thanksgiving came and went, all of the ghosts, scarecrows and pumpkins cluttering people’s yards had been replaced by illuminated snowmen, blinking trees and inflatable plastic globes with dancing figurines inside. My daughter, however, didn’t seem to distinguish the difference. “Look, Mommy!” she hollered from the backseat, on our nightly drive home from preschool. “It’s Halloweeeeeen!” “I Piglet!” she announced without warning to several unsuspecting shoppers at our neighborhood grocery store, upon seeing wreathes and other red and green “Halloween” decorations around the store. “And I eat LOTS of candy!” How great would that be, I marveled to myself, to live in a reality where all the magic and thrill of a holiday goes away, and then comes back all over again, as if it had never happened, just a few weeks later!? What began as a few cute remarks from a toddler worth a quick “status update” on my Facebook account became a topic of deep emotional attachment to me. Each day when I picked her up at school or drove her about town on errands, I found my heart quickening at each “Look, Mommy!” from the backseat. “Look, Mommy, a ghost!” she remarked one time, as we drove past a snowman. “Look, Mommy, Look! Sponge Bob and a giraffe!” as we drove past Santa and his reindeer. I admit it: Her misinterpretations delighted me. This, then, begged an obvious question. Why was I so eager to glom on to this alternate reality? Did I really want my daughter to grow up without the word ‘Christmas’ even entering her vocabulary? My rational answer is Of course not. Half of her ancestral family is Christian. Most of her friends and neighbors in life will probably be Christian. I want her to grow up loving and embracing the world she lives in, not wincing and railing against it. Still, I found myself longing to protect her sweetness, her innocence, for just a little while longer. Can’t I have just one or two years? I found myself bargaining at the steering wheel as I drove about town. Can’t we at least make it to age 3 before she starts asking about Santa? Before she has to start wanting so many things? Before she realizes she is different from most other kids? The more I thought about it, the more of a slippery slope it seemed to be. First, she’ll be asking about Christmas, and presents, and a bearded fat man. Then it will be Jesus, and who is he and why don’t we believe in him? Before I know it, I’ll be trying to explain the Holocaust! And the Inquisition! And what it’s like to live in Oklahoma where the bakeries make challah and call them ‘circus bread’! From the backseat, Adiel’s sweet voice saved me from my own thoughts. “Ohhhh, Mommy, Listen!” she whispered, in a hushed tone of reverence. “That an angel!?!?!” Outside our car window, a church bell was ringing. • Yesterday, a full twelve days before The Big Event, Adiel’s naivety -- and mine -- came to its expected end. We were creeping through town in the car: “Look, Mommy! Lights! Lights!” Adiel piped up, pointing out the window. Sure enough, just outside was an apartment house tastefully outlined in little white bulbs, the soft dance of snow flakes falling all around, framing it like a snow globe. “Oh yes, lights,” I said, intently focused on the road. “Those Halloween lights?” The words had barely left my mouth before Adi gave her swift and strong rebuke. “No, Mommy, no! They not Halloween! They Chrissmas. Chrissmas!” And then, as if that weren’t bad enough, she started repeating that much-dreaded word over and over again like a person with a perverse case of Tourette’s syndrome. “Chrissmas! Chrissmas! Chrissmas! Chrissmas! Chrissmas!” again and again, trying, I imagine, to get a feel for this novel new word on her tongue. “Chriss-MAS! Chriss-MAS!” “You sure they aren’t for Halloween?” I eventually interjected, my voice strained with fatigue. “No, Mommy, no!” she said. “Cause there ribboooons! There red ribbons!” Oh, right, those ribbons, tied in bows. They give Christmas away every time, don’t they? Eight hundred and ninety-six. By my calculation, that’s how many days my daughter lived her life before learning to recognize what Christmas was. For me, the person blessed with the job of trying to raise a citizen of the world, so it will have to be. Joysa Winter is a rabbinical student, editor and writer who lives in Havertown, Pennsylvania, with her family. She blogs at http://wanderinghebrew.com