Even if you accept that Christmas is a secular American cultural holiday - how does he want you to celebrate it? Everybody has different traditions, there's no one thing that everybody does.

I vaguely remember a conversation somewhere or other (was it here? I'm not sure) a year or two ago, when Slate published an article about which Christmas specials are OK to watch in Jewish homes, based on a survey of about five Jewish people about what they watched when they were kids. The list was pretty much the things that I always watched, and one of them was How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Every time I talked to a Jewish person about this article, the immediate response to that mention was a halfway sarcastic, "Well, of course. Clearly the Grinch is Jewish." And we all thought that was funny. But then when I tried that same joke in a mixed group, the reaction from all the Christmas-celebrating people was "Of course the Grinch isn't Jewish! What a horribly antisemitic thing to say!"

Even if you accept that Christmas is a secular American cultural holiday - how does he want you to celebrate it? Everybody has different traditions, there's no one thing that everybody does.

I think he wants me to have a tree and put up lights and wear red and green and stuff like that, because non-Christian people celebrating Christmas will make him more comfortable with his insistence that there's not anything Christian about what he's doing.

I think when people get like that, it's best to remind them what Frankie says.

Also, it's not like there are a shit ton of Haunnaka specials on tv this time of year.

ION: It is fucking freezing in Dallas man! I am so glad we have the underground tunnels downtown. As it was, waiting 8 min for the bus was awful. Having to walk the two and a half bloks outside to the stop would have killed me dead.

Also, it's not like there are a shit ton of Haunnaka specials on tv this time of year.

um, are there ever?

that the way Christmas is celebrated in America is culturally American and has nothing to do with Christianity

AUGH. I hate that argument. If it's the reason you personally feel comfortable celebrating Christmas, fine, but to try to push it on practicing members of other religions is just AUGH.

The nerve of you not validating him, Hil.

I just had that "The Grinch is Jewish" conversation with my husband a while ago - oh, right, because he played Ebenezer Scrooge in an elementary school production of A Christmas Carol and that horrified his mother.

Well that's kinda what I mean.

@ Vortex cause I can't copy/paste on my phone

AUGH. I hate that argument. If it's the reason you personally feel comfortable celebrating Christmas, fine, but to try to push it on practicing members of other religions is just AUGH.

Or even non-practicing members of other religions. Or anybody who has no family or cultural connection to celebrating it and doesn't think that "everybody else is doing it" is a good reason to start celebrating a holiday that we've been told since childhood is Not Ours. The explanation that I've seen a lot for how Jewish parents should deal with the Christmas inundation is that they should tell the kids that Christmas is like somebody else's birthday -- you can go to the other kid's party and have fun, and it's a good thing to help your friends celebrate their birthdays, but you don't get the presents and you don't get to blow out the candles and the kids don't sing to you, because it's not your birthday. But you have a birthday some other time, and you get all that stuff then.

Argh. A professor at another university wrote a letter of recommendation for me. He also wrote one for another grad student at my school. He mailed them to the department secretary here, so that she could photocopy them and send them out to all the schools where we applied for jobs. (He says he does not have access to a scanner or fax machine.) Or, well, he says he put both recommendations into the envelope and mailed it. The secretary here says that only the other student's recommendation was in the envelope, not mine. This is just getting ridiculously frustrating.