Melissa Anne Cohen

When Jessie first started school, I was very hands off about homework.  She started getting it in first grade, which seemed ridiculous to me, but my assumption was that I wasn’t supposed to help with her homework.  If she asked for assistance, sure, I’d help out, but hand holding and correcting?  Nope, I didn’t think I was supposed to do that.  

I was always going to be a writer.  My two favorite literary characters growing up were Jo from Little Women and Emily from the Emily trilogy by L.M. Montgomery.  I kept a diary from the time I was in second or third grade, and just kept writing.  By the time I hit high school, I had settled into an identity of being a bookworm (twenty years later, I can’t tell you how many people have told me their main memory of me in school was that I would walk thru the halls reading) – and I was really good at writing.  I had perfected the essay, English was the one class that came ridiculously easy to me, and I was more comfortable with a pen in my hands than I was at any other time.

But… I never really pursued it.   I went to Emerson College, and studied creative writing, and loved it.  But the love wasn’t enough to overcome the misery that came with being away from home, I hated the city, hated the commute and just wanted to start my life.  So I didn’t stay in college, I moved home, started working full time, and moved out soon after to share an apartment with my cousin.  I found working to be fun – I liked all of the different jobs that I had.  I worked for a while doing retail and moved over into administrative positions and stayed there.  I was good at it – and while I kept writing, I thought of it as just a thing I did.  I was everyone’s first call to write a resume.  I kept reading – I was (and am) always reading, and kept gravitating to books about authors.

Then I met Marc and soon after had Jessica.  This, really, this felt like a calling.  I was delighted when my boss laid me off a couple of months after she was born.  I collected unemployment until it ran out and then settled into stay at home motherhood.  I loved it.  I love it.   I haven’t worked full time since just after Jessie was born.  I went back part time, to an entry level receptionist position when she was a toddler and quit after Sam was born and never looked back.

I’ve been incredibly fulfilled by motherhood.  I’m not sure why, I know not every mother is.  Not every mother loves being home.  A lot of parents get bored and are better parents when they have another job – a job outside of the home.  But I loved it.  I threw myself into it – I, of course, read every book I could find on parenting and child care and spent probably way too much time pondering my children.  But I think I’m good at it – I’ve got good kids.   And there were definitely times when it wasn’t easy, but I don’t regret a minute of staying home with them.  With being that available for them.

But… they get older.  Jessie will be ten in a few weeks (I keep repeating it to myself because the thought that I have a child who’s actually a whole decade old is freaking me out) and Sam is six and a half.  Sam, in particular, was a kid who demanded an enormous amount of intensive, one on one attention.  That’s lessened a lot over the past year.  And Julie – my angel girl Julie, she’s going to be three in a few months.  She’s potty trained, talking, she’s ready for preschool.  I’m rapidly reaching the point where keeping her home, where not enrolling her in preschool would be actually holding her back from developing.

So I’ve got some time.  And I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to do with it.  I’ll end up getting a part time job, I’m sure.  And I’ll probably love it, because I like working.  But I wonder sometimes… if maybe it’s time to put a little time into my own dreams.  To not defer them the way I did when I was 19, and decided that I should drop out of college and then I was working because I had to support myself.   I could write.  I do write.  I write now, not only for this blog, but on MassMoms and on InterfaithFamily.com, and I’ve had a couple of blogs on blogher.   I wonder if I could do it, is there an audience out there that would read my stuff.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/allison-tate/change-of-life_b_2443691.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000009

The link above is to a post on starting a new chapter. On moving from growing a family to raising one. To saying goodbye to the part of your life when you’re having babies. And while I thought, have thought, for a while now, that we’re probably done with that chapter – I realized after reading this blog post that I still don’t know for certain.

Three kids is perfect. Five kids (including my stepdaughters) is also perfect. I always planned on three kids, I have my two glorious girls and my boy that I adore. My life is hectic and busy, and sometimes (often) I’m overwhelmed and sure I’m screwing all three of them up in different ways. I’ve got a daughter on the cusp of adolescence, a son who’s still struggling to stand on his own without me there, and a baby who’s really not a baby at all anymore. Is this it? I thought so – but after reading that blog post again, and getting all teary eyed for the second time, I’m not so sure.

I’m very, very close to having a ten year old, a six year old and a two year old. If I wait another six months, another year, I’d have my perfect three to four year age difference between kids. Another baby right now – no. I know that’s not what I want. But no more baby EVER? I don’t know. What she was describing was so sad to me – “Never again will I dart furtively down an aisle in a drugstore toward the pregnancy tests, never again will I carry the thrilling secret that a new baby is coming, never again will I usher a new life into the world, hear my newborns’ strident cries or rub their tiny backs.” I don’t know that I’m ready for that. I’m not ready to say never again.

I’m willing to go with probably not. I’m almost forty. My husband will be forty four this summer. And where would I put a baby? Am I ready to sign up for another couple of years of my body not being mine? I’ve been nursing or pregnant for almost seven years straight now. If I get pregnant within the next year – that’d easily bump that up to a full decade (because really, I don’t see Julianna weaning before she turns three in the spring – but that’s a whole other blog post…)

In the end, I know that this decision may end up being out of my hands. By not deciding, my body my decide for me. I think I’ve got a while before I lose the ability to bear a child, and certainly, pregnancies come with more risks the older you get. Julianna’s pregnancy was utter misery – my liver stopped working right, I ITCHED everywhere, and I’m pretty sure they induced because I was flirting with pre-eclampsia, my blood pressure was sky high and I was on bed rest at the very end. And I’ve learned that raising kids just gets harder. The problems get more difficult and the solutions so much harder to find. 


I might be perfectly happy with my two glorious girls and my boy that I adore. I already have so much to be grateful for – and maybe it’d tempting fate to ask for more. But I don’t know that the day is ever going to come when I can say for sure and for certain that I’m absolutely, completely done. That I know that I’m never going to have another baby. For me, for us, I think we really want to keep that door open. Yeah, it’s close to shut, and it might drift that way – but I don’t think either one of us wants to be the one to slam the door on the possibility of another baby.

I loved my grandfather. I loved my grandmother as well, but my grandfather was special. He and I were kindred spirits, and I have these amazing memories of times we spent, just the two of us, at museums or hiking or stargazing at the golf course. We were the only readers in the family, and he bought me a subscription to National Geographic magazine because he wasn’t at all impressed that I was spending so much time reading Sweet Valley High books. He taught me to play chess, he taught me about politics and history and I still think of him every day, even though he passed away a few years ago. 

Marc was very close with his grandfather as well, spending time over there after school and on vacations. In fact, when we were thinking of a name for our son, it made perfect sense to name him after both of our grandfathers, Samuel and Earl. He was also very close with his maternal grandmother (which is where we got the Anna of Julianna). He still talks about her, and she died before I met Marc. 

Our own kids are blessed to have both sets of grandparents living locally. Marc’s parents live in Worcester and my parents are just out in Clinton. And while they see their grandparents all the time, I don’t get the sense that there is as tight a bond as I’d like. I’m not sure why. But I think it has to do with alone time. We see them all the time, as a family. They come here for dinner, we go there for the afternoon. Get together for ice cream or to go to hockey game, go shopping or out for lunch. But it’s always as a family. 

The kids are getting older now – but for a very long time, I always had a little one. A little one that was nursing, specifically, and cried hysterically when I left. Sam was an extremely attached baby/toddler, and leaving him anywhere was next to impossible.  As a result, I didn’t often leave. So while my older daughter Jessie has a closer bond with both sets of grandparents, Sam and Julie’s exposure to them has always been with either Marc or I there. What I never really thought about was that having a parent there, in a real sense, was a buffer that kept them from really bonding to them individually. 

But just lately, things have gotten easier. Sam has become a lot more relaxed about going to visit people without one of us there, and Julie – well, Julie has always been pretty cheerful about hanging with people other than her parents. And I’ve really noticed that as they get older, they enjoy their grandparents so much more. They light up at the prospect of going to see their Grammy and Dzidia (polish for grandfather), and dinners at Safta (hebrew for grandmother) and Papa’s house have become cause for celebration as well. 

One of my birthday resolutions (I always make resolutions at the end of the month at my birthday instead of the beginning) is going to be to really encourage those relationships. My kids are blessed with really wonderful grandparents that love and adore them. But they need time to nurture those relationships, time to build the same kind of memories that their dad and I have of special times spent with our grandparents. And in order to do that, we have to get out of the way. Let them be together, just the two of them, without having a parent to be in the middle. 

Marc’s job has grown to include nights.  Not all the time, but mostly, at night, he’s not home until nine or even  later (all this week, he’s been working until midnight).  So I’ve had to develop my own new routines for putting all three kids to bed.  Since they’re all different ages, with different sleep needs – I put them to bed one at a time.

Sam is my boy who requires the most nighttime sleep.  So I make sure to get him asleep by eight thirty at the latest.  Lately, he’s been reading to me at night before bed.  After dinner, I clean up and putter around, trying to find lunch boxes and make sure homework is in the right folder and backpack.  Sam and Julie usually play together in the living room, while Jessie does…  stuff.  She’s usually busy in her bedroom, rearranging her treasures, or curled up on my bed, watching television.  The two little ones play so well together most of the time, they get a little (okay, a lot) loud at times, but mostly they get along and can really play together on the same level.

Then I’ll holler that it’s time to get ready for bed, and Sam always bops into his jammies and brushes his teeth, gets a cup of water.  Then he’ll come and sit with me, sometimes Julie will come and listen to him read as well.  His reading skills are improving so much – sometimes he struggles with trying to guess what the word is based on the picture, and I’m always surprised that he doesn’t just LOOK at the word before blurting something out there, but he’s getting better every night.   And the best part is that it’s all self directed – he WANTS to read to me each night and I love it.

After reading, we switch it up.  This is the time when Sam and I go lay down and snuggle, chat about the day, watch Iron Chef together while he drifts off to sleep.  Jessie takes over with Julie – they get ready for bed together, sometimes they’ll brush their teeth together, and sometimes she’ll sit and read with her.  It’s wonderful – Jessie is such a great big sister to Julie.  She dotes on her, taking care of her and Julie loves every minute of it.  Julie loves Sam like a playmate, he’s her go-to sibling for playing – but Jessie really is like a second mother to her.  And the time when I’m alone, hanging with Sam, is the time when they really get to spend together.

Once Sam’s asleep, I’ll usually fix Julie her “second supper” because she normally skips the first one.  She got into the habit of waiting to eat with Marc at night, and more often than not, she’ll just play with dinner while the rest of us eat and then she’ll eat with Yaya when he comes home.   Only lately, he’s not coming home until so late – so I try and get her to eat a little something while I’m putting Jessie down, or I’ll eat with her after both the older two are asleep.  Jessie doesn’t require a lot, in terms of putting her to bed.   A quick snuggle, a little chat, and usually several reminders that she needs to actually close her eyes to go to sleep…

Ah – to my original point.  While I was putting Jessie to bed, Julie was in the living room.  I had put on a show for her (her current favorites are Team Umizoomi and Dora/Diego) and when I came out of the bedroom, she was sitting in her little rocking chair, completely absorbed in ripping off paper towels off the roll.  One at a time, it was one of those rolls that has the little six inch long strips, so you can take as much or as little as you’d like.  Apparently, Julie wanted a lot of little pieces.  I looked at her, and she looked at me, and I asked what she was doing.  She blithely answered (as though it should have been obvious because it brought her enormous satisfaction) “I ripping dem.”  So now I’ve got paper towels all over the floor, because, honestly, it didn’t hurt anyone, and stopping her would have really bothered her.  Pick your battles, as they say, and now if you need a paper towel at my house – no worries, I’ve got a bunch pre-ripped waiting for you.

I went out today.  Not for long, just for lunch and shopping with my mother in law and Julianna, but when I came back, Jules went down for a nap.  Marc went to pick up the kids from school while I was putting her down, and when they got back, Jessie and I sauntered down the street to return her boots at Payless and get the right size.

None of this is remarkable, except that when I came home… my house looked as though a bomb had gone off.  It was clean, really clean, as of last night just before bedtime.  But there was an hour or so this morning where Julie was playing wily-nily in the living room and then an hour or so while Jessie and I were out and about, with Marc here and the Boy playing.  And the house… my good God – it was just stupendously messy.  Dishes everywhere, army guys and dollhouse furniture battling out for supremacy in the living room.  Laundry scattered around the house, dishwasher not loaded, laundry not folded…

I’m at a loss.  I should be cleaning, I’m just too tired to attempt much more than basic upkeep.  So the dishwasher is going, the washer and dryer are both running and that’s as good as it’s going to get until tomorrow.   If I ever want to feel essential, and the kids/husband aren’t enough to make me feel loved and needed, I’ll just take a day off and let the house fall apart – because apparently, I perform such a necessary task of CONSTANTLY PICKING UP CRAP that when I stop or take a few hours off to go shopping, all hell breaks loose.  I’ll be playing catch up for days…

Marc is working nights this week, and I’m a sad and lonely girl without him here.  Julie is a sad and lonely girl, and Sam asked sadly if Daddy had no work tonight, knowing that he did and just hoping for another answer.   Jessie is actually just really happy that there’s a new episode of Bunheads that I recorded for her, but I’m sure she’s missing her dad as well.  We got all her homework finished earlier and now all that’s left is for me to nag her into the shower, get her hair brushed afterwards, Sam and Julie need jammies and Sam needs to read to me,  Julie skipped dinner again (she’s got a habit of skipping dinner when I feed the other kids and eating later on when Marc gets home – sadly, he won’t be home tonight until well after midnight…), so I need to try and shove a little food into her before bed.

Nothing really earth shattering going on here today – just a normal sort of Tuesday.  Harrison was here for a playdate and Joy and I had coffee and caught up while the boys played and Jessie avoided doing her homework.  Julie sat mostly on my lap, nursing off and on.  Tomorrow is religious school for Jessie, although I’m seriously considering keeping her home to hard core study, study, study for her unit test in math.   Aimee will be here for dinner tomorrow night, she’s heading down to NY on Thursday on the bus, and it’s easier to catch the one in Worcester – so at least I’ll have a little adult companionship tomorrow night.

I don’t really do New Year’s Eve.  It feels redundant to me, with Rosh Hashana as the Jewish New Year, and my birthday in January, I’ve already got the holiday covered.  So having another day to celebrate another beginning of the same year… I’m okay with skipping it.   That being said, I do have children who believe wholeheartedly in New Year’s Eve.   Complete with take-out, a desperate attempt to stay up late enough to see the ball drop, and a rocking dance party.  All of which we did last night.   We rented Shrek Forever, I think it was called.  The last Shrek movie, and everyone sat and watched it.  Even Julie – and she’s not great with movies.  But this one made sense to her, because the “Yaya was so sad.”  She immediately got that Shrek was a dad who had lost his wife and his three kids (his Mama, G, Boy, and Baby).    After the movie, the kids danced for a while.  They danced to every song on the credits, and then we switched to the New Year’s show, and they danced to that.  By 10:00, I was done, exhausted and could see that they were too.  I took Julie off to bed, and then came in and got Sam.  Sam was so cute, he said to me “I’ll just pretend the ball just dropped – YAY!” as he got into bed.  Then I shut off all the lights, set the auto shut off on on the cable box for a few minutes after midnight and told Jessie and Glennys they were on their own.

So we’re up, rocking migraine and kids still bouncing off the wall.   Glennys is going home today, and my kids are going to miss her incredibly.  Jessie has already broken down sobbing three times over the fact that she was going home, and Sam and Julie… it’s going to be ugly.  As much as they love having her come down, they hate having her leave.

I don’t generally post recipes here, mainly because I really don’t like to cook, and it’s so ridiculously easy to get recipes on line, it seems silly to put them here.  But I found a couple of recipes this week and my kids LOVE them.  One is for finnish pancakes.  You take half a stick of butter, stick it in a pie plate, and melt the butter in a four hundred degree oven.  While the butter is melting, mix together two thirds of a cup of milk, two thirds of a cup of flour, a teaspoon of cinnamon and suguar, and three eggs.  Dump it in the pan when the butter is melted and bake for 20 minutes.  After twenty minutes, pull it out and sprinkle more cinnamon and sugar on it, and then bake for another five minutes or so.  It’s awesome.  I also had my mother dig out her cinnamon bun recipe, and that’s kind of awesome as well.  So I baked a lot this week, made chocolate chip cookies, lots of bread, and four batches of finnish pancakes.

It’s very different from raising a daughter.  Not in some ways, but in others – it’s a completely different experience.  I’m not talking just about pointing the peepee down when changing diapers (a lesson I sincerely wish someone had mentioned before I went thru a week of leaking diapers – postpartum, with no sleep, it took a ridiculously long time for me to clue in).  I’m not even talking about learning all of the names of farm equipment and construction vehicles, or understanding why fire engines and trash trucks are so fascinating.

I’m talking about the deeper things.  I’m talking about masculinity.  And that’s a subject I know very little about.  I was raised by a single mother, in a very female dominated family.   I was a very feminine kid.  I preferred dresses and hair bows to jeans and a tshirt.  I’d always rather stay inside and read than go outside and run around.  I’ve never voluntarily touched a frog.  I’ve never accidentally touched a frog, now that I’m thinking about it.  I don’t like scary rides, I don’t like scary movies.  I’m frilly and girly, I like boppy music and sunshine and lollipops.  And my two daughters, thus far, are feminine little girls.  Jessie more so than Julie, but Julie’s two, and with an older brother as her most immediate influence.  Jessie wouldn’t touch a frog for money, would dress in lace and hair bows every day, and would never voluntarily go outside to perform manual labor.

Then there’s Sam.  And he’s…. a boy.  I mean, a boy in a way that is completely different from my girls.  From myself.  Today, he got up, announced he needed to do some shoveling, put on snow gear, and headed out.  He brought up my recycling bins onto the porch, and spent the next hour outside, diligently shoveling my front lawn.  Because the fact that there was no snow on the sidewalks or front steps wasn’t going to stop him.  He was shoveling.  I don’t get that.  I love it.  But on a core level, I can’t understand heading out into the frigid freezing cold because you need to shovel.  When in fact, you don’t need to shovel.  For one thing, he’s six.  And for another, Marc had already shoveled yesterday.  But it was so icy and dangerous, I wouldn’t let him go out yesterday.

He’s got a whole different perspective.  He’s a boy – and different on a level that I’m still struggling to understand.  He wants to be a man.  He wants to be a good man.  And thank God, he’s got such an incredible example to follow.  Marc is as masculine as I am feminine.  Marc likes wrestling and army shows and is perplexed by emotional complexity.  He can’t talk for hours about how he feels.  Coming off of December – despite my hours of agonizing and discussing how he feels about Christmas – every time it came up in conversation, he’d screw it up.  He’d say something that would make me nuts – but when it came to action – he was right there.  He gave my kids the best Christmas, did all the shopping, all the prep work, and bent over backwards to make it awesome because he loves me and he knew it was important to me.  Because doing something, that’s so much easier for him.  Sam is so similar to him.  So incredibly similar to him, he wants to be just like his daddy.  And it’s not just about being like his daddy, he is fundamentally like him already.

Don’t get me wrong – Sam has part of me in there too.  I recognize his shyness, because I’m the same way.  And my son loves a lot of traditional feminine things like cooking and cleaning and snuggles and is such a tender, sweet boy.  But he’s a boy, not a girl, and sometimes it just really strikes me that I don’t understand him the way I do the girls.  Adore him with every fiber of my being, absolutely.  But I’m so, so glad that Sam has Marc.  I’m as grateful that my girls have a daddy that loves them and supports them and teaches them every day what a good man should do.  But with Sam – Marc is modeling what he’ll grow up to be – and Sam watches and absorbs all of it.  As an adult, I’m sure that you’ll see my influence on him as well, he’ll make my challah recipe, and I hope that he’ll decorate a Christmas tree.  I’m sure he’ll dance around the kitchen when he cooks like I do, and I hope that he’ll love to read like I do.  I’m sure that he’ll do lots of things the way that I do – but mostly, I hope that he’s the kind of man his father is.  I also sincerely hope that he never really moves that far away, so when Marc is too old to shovel my walkways – he’ll come and do it for me.

We survived another year.   And in the end, we did really well.  Only one serious fight, and we resolved it that night.  We’ll probably always have at least one battle every year, but we work thru it.  In the end, I’m always going to want Marc to embrace Christmas the way I embrace Judaism.  And in the end, he always comes thru in awesome ways, I just … I don’t know.  I fight with him over not feeling the way that I want him to – and since I do truly believe that actions speak louder than words, I need to remember that he does, in the end, work hard to make sure our kids have great Christmases.  He’s far better than I am at maintaining the Santa myth, oddly enough.  I don’t lie when asked outright, whereas he spun this tale about licensing – how the mall Santas have to be licensed in order to wear the costume, because he and Sam had already had a long discussion about trademarking things earlier in the month.

But either way – another year over.  It was a really, really nice Christmas.  Very peaceful and relaxed, and just lovely.  Christmas Eve with chinese food and friends was perfect, especially because this year, in addition to Joy and Skip and their kids and Becky and Aimee and Abby, we also got my sister and niece to go.  And Christmas morning was delightful, the kids were thrilled with their gifts, we got them each a couple of nice things and a ton of chocolate (Marc appears to believe that giving the kids a good Christmas involves a lot of candy).  Then we headed down to my mother’s house for the day.

The nice thing about going to my mother’s house is that my kids really, really like her.  And my stepdad.  He’s such a great grandpa to them, and at one point, Julie climbed up and sat next to him, and my heart just melted.  I was missing my grandfather a lot that day, and seeing my daughter loving her grandfather was so sweet.   Reassuring.  My brother and sister and their kids were bopping around that day too, and I just had the nicest day.

Now we’re in the throes of Christmas vacation, and we’ve got our bestest friend Glennys down for the week.  I’m so grateful for her – not only because she’s Jessie’s best friend, so utterly and absolutely.   These two just click in a way that I’ve never seen Jessie click with another kid.  Plus Sam and Julie absolutely adore her.  I’m spending all day going from mess to mess – but they’re having so much fun it’s hard to mind.  My two girls just took baths (Jessie did it only to get Julie in the tub – Julie still views bathtime as torture), and immediately upon getting out Julie announced that she needed her hat.  Everyone’s tired and I’m planning on early dinner and early bedtime tonight, Marc’s taking the older kids (that’s everyone except Julianna) to the hockey game tomorrow night.

I’m Jewish, and pretty happy about it.  But, yeah, I still celebrate Christmas.  I don’t celebrate it as the birth of Christ, but it’s still a tremendously meaningful and important holiday for me.  I wouldn’t say it’s my favorite holiday of the year – there’s too much other stress going on for that.  December is decidedly a challenging month for us here, between the number of Jewish people who write articles that I can’t stop myself from reading that assure me that a tree has no place in a Jewish home, and worrying about whether or not people are judging me for putting up the tree anyway and celebrating a holiday that has never been particularly Christian to me, but is most definitely not Jewish.   Plus, it’s honestly a hard month for my husband, who grew up not only not celebrating Christmas, but not celebrating it is almost a part of his Jewish identity – so it’s never easy.

But celebrate it we do, enthusiastically.  I’ve got stocking hung by the chimney with care, and a tree that’s lopsided, with way too many lights on it, and ornaments that are well loved and not particularly coordinated.  I’ve got pictures of all of my babies with Santa Claus, and tinsel and candy canes EVERYWHERE.  So why do I celebrate?  Why do I insist on participating in holiday that everyone keeps telling me is all about rampant consumerism and materialism?  If I strip away the Christian connotations to it, what exactly is Christmas all about?  And why exactly do I insist every year that we celebrate it?

I celebrate it because it’s wrapped up in some of my favorite memories from my childhood.  Caroling with my cousins, singing songs to my sister at night before we fell asleep.  Every Christmas Eve, my little sister would beg to sleep in my bed with me, and I’d tell her stories about Santa and swear that I could see Rudolph’s nose in the sky.  Baking Christmas cookies with my baby cousins, and taking my nieces and nephews out at night to look for the prettiest Christmas lights.  My mother has this one song – Mary’s Boy Child, and it’s this odd sort of Jamaican Christmas carol, and every time it comes on the radio, she’d turn it up as loud as it could go and rock out.  My mother doesn’t rock out as a rule, and watching her chair boogie in the car while we drove anywhere in December was (and is) kind of awesome.

I celebrate it because I love the anticipation of Christmas Day.  I love that my kids talk about Santa Claus (despite the fact that both the older ones know it’s just a myth).  When I was a kid, I loved that sense, all month long, that we were building up to this one day when magically, just because, we’d wake up and find that someone had brought us presents, just because.  It’s not about the gifts, exactly.  Looking back, I don’t remember any specific Christmas gift that I ever got that made a huge impression.  What I remember is the magic, the excitement and the joy of it all.  I want that for my kids.

I celebrate it because I’m my mother’s daughter.  And I’m raising her grandchildren.  Having a child convert to a different religion isn’t easy, and my mother supported me and stood beside me every step of the way.  I’ve never doubted her love or commitment, and I can’t imagine how disappointed she’d be if I didn’t give my kids the same opportunity to love Christmas as she gave me.  I won’t do that to her.  I won’t do that to her grandchildren.  It’s not that she wants them to not be Jewish – she just wants to know that they’re still a part of her family, celebrating her favorite holidays and traditions.  Like sleeping over at Grammy’s house on the night before Thanksgiving, and trekking up to Maine every year to camp at Hermit Island – celebrating Christmas, for my mother, is about spending time with her kids, and her grandchildren.  Passing along those traditions.  I’m not willing to tell them that it’s not their holiday just because they’re Jewish.  Yes, they’re Jewish, but they’re also a part of my family too and they get to do our fun stuff as well. 

I celebrate it because I believe in peace on earth and goodwill towards men.  And having a day to celebrate that is lovely to me.  I celebrate it because I feel a little closer to everyone else on earth during this time of year – it seems to me that it’s the one time when we all try a little harder to be nicer, a little harder to appreciate the blessings we have.   We don’t always succeed, and we aren’t all on the same page, but I sincerely think that the world is an amazing and beautiful and blessed place.  On Christmas, I think we all feel that way.

It’s not about the shopping or the wrapping or the stress.  And for me, it’s not about celebrating the birth of the Messiah.  It’s about joy and peace – it’s closer to a celebration that we’re coming into the light.  It’s no accident that the Solstice is on the twenty-first – we are literally getting a little more light, just a bit, every day.  I think that’s worth celebrating.  I think having a day to stop and just celebrate the magic, celebrate the beauty of family and friends, to eat candy canes and drink eggnog, to watch your kids open presents and be absolutely delighted is awesome.  Christmas isn’t perfect, and it’s nowhere near as simple and as easy as it used to be for me, but it’s still an integral part of my year.  And my life.  I don’t want to miss it.  Being Jewish has added so much to my life, so much meaning and resonance, it’s given my kids a framework to build a spiritual life upon.  It’s given me Shabbat dinner, and Passover Seders and a community that I love.  But I still love Christmas.