The Coffee Table

Born in a manger?

The December holiday season was always a joyous time for me as a child. I loved walking through multiple Christmas tree lots to pick out just the right specimen for our living room, then carrying our prize home—my mother, my father, and I, each with a gloved hand around the prickly trunk, walking through the Chicago slush. I wasn’t really aware of the religious significance of Christmas, but I knew that most of the people in our building were Jewish and celebrated the season differently than we did.

My third-grade year, we lived on the California coast. We still had a lovely tree in our living room, but the summer temperature was out of the ordinary. Much like, I gather, the Christmas holidays my grown daughter Down-Under now experiences.

When we moved to Michigan, Christmas was back in all its magical snow-white glory. And we had a car onto which we’d tie the tree we purchased! I was starting to understand a bit more about the “why” of Christmas. I noticed there were no mezuzahs on neighboring doorways. 

Throughout our holiday seasons, we listened to our traditional Christmas music—probably introduced to my family by my father who was an audiophile. We had no TV, but we had a world-class stereo. “Amal and the Night Visitors,” “Black Nativity,” and Benjamin Britten’s “Ceremony of Carols” were among our top five greatest Christmas hits.

Papa would blast the stereo and we would dance around the tree, drinking his homemade eggnog and hanging ornaments—after he had hung the lights because he was apparently the only one who could do it correctly. It was magical. Every year. And some of the traditions were passed on to my own offspring. The music for certain. (The eggnog not so much—mine never tasted like Pop’s.) And we added a tradition of our own—taking in “holiday orphans,” those people we knew who could not be with loved ones for the holiday. 

But over the years, I found trouble with one of the songs we listened to annually—a slow song, about the “Poor little holy child. We made you be born in a manger…We didn’t know ‘twas you.” In other words, had we known you were the chosen one, we would have ordered up a suite at the Hilton. But we thought you were just another schmo for whom a manger-birth was good enough.

This kind of thinking is what makes some churches a little bit scary in my view. I’m no religious scholar, but I thought the point was to treat all people as if they were worthy—not to pick and choose based on who might be king.

I heard a story about a pastor who, as pastors ought, encouraged his parishioners to treat all people with kindness—not just those whose clothes are pressed and who remember to put on their deodorant daily. One Sunday morning, congregants encountered an apparently homeless man, supine, on church grounds. Some folks gently inquired as to the man’s needs, while others were aghast that their churchyard had been defiled and wanted the man removed. When the pastor revealed himself to be the “homeless man” his flock had plenty to think about.

This is my family’s first Christmas since my husband’s passing and will likely be relatively low key. Without the décor or the “orphans.” But I wish you all a jolly holiday, whether or not Jesus is the reason for your season. And whether or not you were born in a manger.