One holiday secret kept, another painfully snuffed

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This article was published 06/01/2025 (589 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Lived lives

Winnipeg writer Deborah Schnitzer explores life lessons from women in their Third Act.

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In this new year, as holiday hoopla subsides, I welcome the time for further reflection, particularly because in 2024 Hanukkah and Christmas fell on the same day.

I found myself rehearsing the “same-day” story of my childhood I habitually performed for friends and family. I called that version “Tuesday Night,” relishing it as an expression of my mother’s generosity in the face of what I believed to be my father’s frugality. Today, I understand it differently.

My childhood story went like this:

My mother, though Jewish, had been raised in a household without boundaries between Jewish and Christian holidays. My father opposed such a practice. While I thought of my mother’s father as the merriest of men, my father found his embrace of both festivities needlessly whimsical, illogical — if not foolhardy.

My mother prevailed in her ambition to retain her childhood tradition. My father rebelled. His slow boil shadowed Dec. 24 and 25. It was impossible for him to admire my mother’s effort: the tension infiltrated the Christmas Day turkey, spread as a pall over the dinner table, and upended gift-giving and receiving.

My father’s sour look and word tainted every potentially festive aspect.

On the same-day-Tuesday Night phenomenon of my childhood, my father was at the Armory’s Officers’ Mess, sharing a meal with veterans, reminiscing about wartime experiences. My mother lit our first Hanukkah candle and then suddenly revealed a scrawny tree, lights and tinsel, all of which she’d somehow kept hidden.

Worried lest we be discovered, yet tantalized by the magic, we sang carols, knowing every word by heart, having learned them in school. We got Santa’s snack ready, ate leftover cookies and dreamed while awake, astonished at the transgression we had achieved

Well before my father returned, we dismantled the tree. It was a group effort. Four children who argued about anything and everything contentedly co-operated. Our father was a Grinch whose heart would not grow to accommodate our mother’s insistence her children enjoy Santa as well as the eight days of Hanukkah.

This was my go-to same-day story.

Another version, however, comes to mind this January.

My father never spoke of his war experiences at home. How that silencing had affected him we would never know, except through conjecture as we grew older, informed in some measure by studies and stories that reveal the persistent, debilitating effects of wartime trauma.

We knew he was as devoted to the Officers’ Mess as he was to the local synagogue — he was its president for decades. We knew he was learned in Second World War military history, the Holocaust and the role of Christianity in relation to antisemitism — the accusations of deicide and blood libel, the realities of pogrom and expulsion, forced conversion, ghettoization and genocide.

Had we understood more about him, we might have been able to grasp his points of view, but as with many things in childhood, the intricacies of a parent’s experience are vaguely if ever shared with the children inheriting its aftereffects. The “arrangement” between my parents — my father “allowed” Christmas; my mother “allowed” his ill temper — did not promote a sense of ease or well-being, but as my parents rarely agreed on anything, I became somewhat inured.

I think now that my father wished to resist what he considered my mother’s assimilationist tendencies, feeling that in raising his children in the tradition and experiences that raised him, they would be more sure of their own heritage, more able to treasure and secure their identity in a world he found neither safe nor welcoming.

I never told my father about the one-time, same-day phenomenon my mother orchestrated. We had made a solemn pact.

I don’t know what my father would have done if he’d found out. In my child’s mind, he would have huffed and puffed, perhaps tried to blow the house down, but that is once again a child trying to process the distance between her parents and their sense of what children “should” experience.

My father was not one to reveal his depth. My mother, a more open book, shared hers with greater ease. Accordingly, I understood my father’s misgivings only through her desire to retain a cherished childhood tradition.

As an adult now, many decades removed from my childhood, I am sorry I did not break that pact and tell this story to my father in his later years when age and zaida-hood might have allowed him to share his own story and feelings.

I am sad I will never know if that could have happened, but gladdened, because in this new year, I have a better grasp of his position and the difficult knowledge he dedicated himself to understanding in terms of the history and the meanings of Christmas and Hanukkah he wrestled with on his own.

arts@freepress.mb.ca