To Tree or Not to Tree

It wasn’t until I was 10 years old that I had my own Christmas tree. I don’t recall discussing with my parents why we celebrated the season without a tall, fragrant, decked-out fir; perhaps because our religious faith (reform Judaism) should have been explanation enough.

But at some point during that December, an artificial tabletop tree, dust-coated and abandoned by the previous owners, called out to me from the corner of the damp basement of our new house.

I hauled it upstairs, then proceeded to test-drive all of the decorative skills that I’d romanticized during repeated readings of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House on the Prairie” books. After carefully plunging a threaded needle through cranberries and popcorn, I looped the red-and-white ropes over stiff fake branches. When I was finished, I placed the tree on the hearth of our living room fireplace, where it sat ignored -- a sad, cringe-worthy example of both my fumbling crafts skills and religious defection.

From my perspective, though, I wasn’t besmirching the eight days of Hanukkah, I was merely securing for myself a tiny scrap of the sentimental holiday tableaux that I knew about from “Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color,” Hallmark cards, my non-Jewish friends’ homes and seasonal plastic snow domes.

For many modern semi- observant Jews, the Christmas tree is not an emblem of Christianity but an expression of how they feel about their Jewishness. This is the discussion that my friends (especially those in mixed-religion families) and I have: Does having a tree mean you have assimilated? Become a faux Christian? Or is Christmas so commercialized that the tree is utterly secular? As long as you know who you are, does it matter either way?

Here’s the background on my parents’ no-tree policy. Growing up in Boyle Heights, then the most densely populated Jewish community in the West, my mother saw flexibility in her religion. Her Hanukkah experiences ran the gamut from memories of Yiddish-speaking, meticulously Orthodox grandparents to parents who were neither observant nor adamantly non-observant. She didn’t have a tree, simply as a matter of course.

For my father, though, not having a Christmas tree was crucial. Born and raised in a small town on the border of Arizona and Mexico, he was a secular Jew in a Roman Catholic Latino community. Even if he and his family chose to attend synagogue, which they didn’t, they’d first have had to pile into their tan, four-door Chevrolet and drive 65 miles to the big city, Tucson. In their three-bedroom, hilltop home on the outskirts of town, the pointed absence of yuletide adornment was one way for his nonreligious immigrant parents to express a deep attachment to their Jewish heritage.

With World War II and the Holocaust still fresh in their minds, my parents were part of a generation of American Jews who felt a need to deepen their own and their children’s intellectual and emotional knowledge of Jewish ethnicity and religion. That meant no tree in our house.

But not wanting his offspring to feel left out, my architect father once decided to fill the empty hole in the living room where a Christmas tree might stand. The way the story goes, for a couple of days he could be found in his free hours banging around in his garage workshop, constructing his concept of a Christmas-tree substitute for Hanukkah: a hand-pegged, lovingly sanded 6-foot-tall wooden Star of David. Then, one afternoon, for reasons he never shared, he abruptly deserted the project. Maybe it wasn’t turning out how he’d envisioned it. Menorah-lighting, dreidel-spinning and lattke-frying were going to have to do the trick.

As for me, once I got that cranberry-and-popcorn moment out of my system, the answer to the Christmas tree question was always no, even after I married a non-Jew. The son of churchgoing, holiday-cheer-happy Episcopalians, my husband was no Grinch. Let’s just say he was the kind of kid who preferred watching old Christmas movies on his bedroom television to singing “Away in a Manger” or draping tinsel on a tree.

He lights Hanukkah candles with my family, I bake sugar cookies with his family -- agreeable tourists in each other’s tradition. Of course, he could change his mind. The question would resurface. And then it would be time to get out the “Little House” books again.