December 17, 2004/Tevet 5 5765, Vol. 57, No.16
Cards meld Chanukah, ChristmasFor new greeting-card company, Chrismukkah time is here at last
CHANAN TIGAY
|
 Many intermarried families celebrate both Chanukah and Christmas. Here, Sophie Stern, daughter of Amy Silverman and Ray Stern of Tempe, poses in front of the menorah and under Christmas stockings. Photo by Ray Stern |
| Related stories |
| Christmas trees for Tu B'Shevat |
| A secular Christmas in Israel |
"She believes they were spared only because my grandmother in Germany had married the love of her life, her next-door neighbor, just as the Third Reich was taking over," says Klug's grandson, Ron Gompertz. "He was Lutheran."
Today Gompertz - himself married to the daughter of a minister in the United Church of Christ - has taken the spirit of his grandmother's belief and given it a lighthearted spin.
Along with his wife, Michelle, Gompertz recently launched Chrismukkah.com. The site markets a line of greeting cards for interreligious families looking to harmonize the "December Dilemma," in which mixed couples struggle with how best to celebrate their faiths' divergent traditions - particularly when they have children.
"It's about tolerance. It's about understanding each other. It's about getting along," Gompertz says by phone, en route to the UPS drop-off site 20 miles from his rural Montana home to mail boxes of ordered cards.
And although he acknowledges that it is "not a real holiday," Gompertz says Chrismukkah can introduce families to each other's traditions "without being threatening or offending."
The Web site, www.Chrismukkah.com, offers about a dozen holiday cards, including one depicting a reindeer with a menorah for antlers; another in which red and white candy canes replace candles in a menorah, and another showing "Chrismukkah Man," a rabbinic figure in a Santa Claus-like outfit.
While the Chrismukkah label is relatively new - the Gompertzes got the name from the Fox TV series "The O.C.," in which a character has a Jewish father and Christian mother - Gompertz says it refers to "the way millions of people experience the holidays together each year."
Chrismukkah isn't for everyone. In her synagogue newsletter, Hillary Brown wrote, "a 'Chrismukkuh' celebration doesn't cut it." Brown and her family are members of Or Adam Congregation, a Humanistic congregation in Tempe. "It takes the most benign symbols of both holidays and forces them into a glittery package until they fit."
Since her husband is not Jewish, the family celebrates a secular version of both holidays. "Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer to keep my traditions separate and equally balanced," she wrote.
One-third of all Jews currently wed are intermarried, according to the 2000-01 National Jewish Population Survey. The study found that intermarriage is rising at a steady pace and stands at 47 percent.
A 2003 report by the Jewish Outreach Institute found that intermarried households may soon become a majority of homes with at least one Jewish member.
The high numbers of intermarried families is not lost on holiday card-makers, which were selling interfaith cards long before Gompertz got into the game.
"Cards are developed on consumer demand," says Deidre Parkes, a spokeswoman for Hallmark Cards Inc. "We started with one" interfaith card "in the late 1990s, and now we have eight."
Parkes says the company's interfaith Christmas-Chanukah cards are typically among its top 10 best sellers marking the festival of lights.
And although these cards make up less than 10 percent of the company's full line of some 100 Chanukah cards, melding the two religions' winter holidays is proving profitable for other companies as well.
American Greetings Corp. offers several such cards, including one depicting a Jewish Santa Claus urging on his reindeer: "On Isaac! On Izzy! On Eli! On Abe! On Levi! On Morty! On Shlomo! On Gabe!" Inside, the card wishes the recipient a "Merry Hanukkah."
For its part, the Chrismukkah site welcomes visitors to "the one place where you don't have to choose. Here you can have it all! Here we celebrate Chrismukkah!"
Rabbi Bonnie Koppell, spiritual leader of Temple Beth Sholom in Chandler, disagrees with the idea of Chrismukkah and opposes such practices as displaying blue lights on the outside of the house or hanging dreidels on a Christmas tree.
"I believe in the integrity of each individual religious tradition," she says. "I understand that there are intermarried couples, I understand that they each want to observe their own tradition. But I think that trying to blend the traditions does a real disservice to each one individually."
She stresses the importance of parents making a decision on the religious observance of their children. "Both is not a fair answer," she says. "It puts too much pressure on the child (and) becomes a contest between the two parents."
However, she says that if a child is well-grounded in his or her own religious tradition, parents shouldn't feel threatened by their children's exposure to other religious traditions - such as celebrating Christmas in a friend's home.
Rabbi Yitzchak Rosenbaum, program director at the National Jewish Outreach Program in New York, also takes issue with Chrismukkah.
"At least I would say to someone, Choose. Pick what you are," he says. "If I were Christian, I would be insulted by taking a Christian symbol and making it Jewish, and I am insulted by taking Jewish symbols and making them Christian."
But Nancy Berglass, a Jewish woman in Los Angeles who is married to an African-American Christian man, finds such cards amusing. "I say more power to them," she says.
Berglass and her husband are not raising their two young children in either faith in particular -she speaks of "a blending of our two religious, cultural legacies" - and they light Chanukah candles and give gifts on both holidays. "The only reason we do any of this is that it is commercially and culturally the norm in ourcountry and we don't want our children to feel excluded," Berglass says. "What that means to our kids is a ton of presents: eight on Chanukah - and for Christmas they get whatever's on sale at Marshall's."
Over the course of the rest of the year, she says, "We tell our children that they're Jewish and we tell them that they're African American, and that they're so lucky that they get to be both of those things."
Not everyone's as supportive of interfaith holiday celebrations. One e-mail sent to Gompertz denounces Chrismukkah as "disgusting and insulting to both Jews and non-Jews alike."
Still, Gompertz says, positive e-mail responses have outnumbered negative ones by about a 10-1 ratio, and the site offers the following disclaimer:
"We respect people's different faiths and do not suggest combining the religious observance of Christmas and Hanukkah."
In a recent survey by the InterfaithFamily.com Web site, more than two-thirds of respondents said they kept their holiday celebrations separate.
About 80 percent, though, said they celebrated both Christmas and Chanukah.
Although the Gompertz's cards are selling well - 12-packs of the "Chrismukkah Bush" and "Oy Joy" varieties have already sold out - Gompertz insists he's not in it for the money.
"No matter how many Chrismukkah cards we sell this year, we're not going to make any money," says Gompertz. "It's about encouraging a dialogue.
"Interfaith marriage in America is one of the last cultural taboos. It doesn't get talked about much."
Managing Editor Leisah Namm contributed to this article.