A Sweet Christmas Octave

some thoughts from a Jewish children's book

Photo by Sapan Patel on Unsplash

My family lives in a very Jewish neighborhood. We’re talking walking-distance-to-several-synagogues level. It is such a delight and such a gift to our family to see other families taking the practice of their faith seriously, especially each week on Shabbat. Of course, there are less-strictly-Orthodox Jews in our neighborhood as well, like our dear neighbor Diane, who swears up and down that James must have Jewish ancestry somewhere in his family tree. “What your last name? Dietz? I have cousins named Dietz, up in New York! You’ve gotta be Jewish.”¹

Although we disagree with Diane on a lot of topics, we love her dearly and always wish her well on Shabbat and other Jewish holy days. She does the same on the Christian feast days that we celebrate. She’s taught us a few words and phrases in Hebrew, and we always love to talk about the things that Judaism and Christianity have in common, given the Jewish roots of Christianity.² “Jesus was a Jewish man!” she tells me all the time.

A few months ago, I found a children’s book in our neighborhood’s Little Free Library titled A Sweet Passover. It’s the story of a young girl named Miriam, who loves matzah so much but comes to feel a little sick of it by the last day of Passover. Her family shares with her the rich symbolism of the matzah bread, and they all talk about their favorite ways to eat matzah. The book ends with Miriam realizing that matzah is a special part of her heritage and her family culture, and her grandfather teachers her his favorite recipe for matzah brei, which is somewhat akin to French toast.

I was so excited to tell Diane about the book. It is important to me that my daughters grow up understanding the Jewish roots of our Christian faith, for many reasons. The find was made even sweeter because I was able to tell Diane about it—she loves my girls, loves her Jewish roots, and loves getting to talk with us about our shared cultural and religious heritage.

Recently, the book has been on my mind again as we enter the Christmas octave. My husband’s family has, at least for as long as I’ve known them, made Swedish pancakes for breakfast on Christmas morning every year. Swedish pancakes are slightly thicker than crepes, but otherwise much the same concept. They’re excellent with a sprinkle of brown sugar and a squirt of lemon. We hosted the Dietz-side Christmas this year, and it was my first time making Swedish pancakes. They turned out great, if I do say so myself, and after James’s siblings had gone, he asked me, “Do you think we could make Swedish pancakes again tomorrow? Just for fun?”

So we had Swedish pancakes for breakfast again on the second day of Christmas. And since we were only cooking for our immediate family, the batch made more than we could eat in one sitting, so we saved half the batter in the fridge… and had Swedish pancakes again for breakfast on the third day of Christmas.

Much like Miriam, I find myself torn between “wow, I love Swedish pancakes” and “I’m not sure how many days in a row I can eat Swedish pancakes before I never want to touch them again”. This is the tension that I think many of us hold when called to live in a particular reality for a long stretch of time.³ Intense focus is difficult to maintain, and what was once exciting and novel quickly becomes monotonous and even off-putting.

How do we live out the Christmas octave, that stretch of time between Christmas Day and the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God on January 1, in a way that is authentically joyful? A way that allows the feasting without becoming indulgent or gluttonous?

The answer, I think, lies in Miriam’s family’s response to her declaration that she’s never going to eat matzah ever again:

“Not even on Passover?” asked Mommy. “But, Miriam, we always eat matzah on Passover. How else will we remember that our ancestors were slaves in Egypt, and when Pharaoh granted them freedom, they had to leave in such a rush, they couldn’t even wait for the bread dough to rise?”

“How else will we remember that even the plainest food eaten in freedom tastes sweeter than the fanciest food eaten in slavery?” Daddy asked.

“That’s why we say, ‘Have a zissen Pesach,’” Grandma told Miriam. “Have a sweet Passover.”

“Matzah is such a simple food, it reminds us to be humble,” explained Uncle Nathan. “It doesn’t puff itself up, and we shouldn’t puff ourselves up, either.”

“It’s a mitzvah to eat matzah,” Aunt Rachel added. “A good deed. And just as the matzah was baked in a hurry, we should always be in a hurry to do a good deed whenever we can.”

“Matzah goes with everything,” Grandpa said. “And that reminds us that we should get along with everyone, too.”

“And if all those reasons weren’t enough for us, dayenu,” Grandma said, “your grandfather happens to make the best matzah brei in the world.”

In other words, we anchor ourselves in the symbolic, sacramental meaning of the season. The foods we eat, the little rituals we carry out, the decorations in our home… they all carry the weight of collective memory, often going back decades or even centuries. We surround ourselves with our community, we build each other up, and we encourage one another. We tell stories. We share meals. And, together, we wrestle with the inevitable human-ness of the holiday season.

It’s not that these traditions are perfect. It’s not that they automatically make the holidays magical or remove any of the complicated emotions that come with broken family dynamics. They won’t create cheer out of thin air, and it would be unreasonable to expect that of them. But just like we can choose to recommit ourselves to our Lenten disciplines, our penances and our detoxes and our fasts, we can choose to recommit ourselves each day to celebration, to feasting, and to reveling in the joy of the Incarnation.

And here’s the great news: we absolutely don’t have to carry on every single tradition we were given, every single tradition we married into, every single tradition we saw on Instagram or Pinterest… We can choose one or two things that speak to our hearts, that really help us to enter into the spirit of the season, no matter what crosses we’re carrying. And then we can learn to see through them to the deeper realities that are being conveyed. We can teach our children to do the same. We can choose to put these things into practice even if we don’t always feel like it. Because the holidays exist for us; we don’t exist for the holidays.

Let’s read that one again and sit with it for a moment. The holidays exist for us. We don’t exist for the holidays. We weren’t created to curate the perfect Christmas experience for our kids. We weren’t created to glorify God with the most impeccable table spread for Christmas dinner or the most color-coordinated ornament set on the Christmas tree. Christmas exists for us. Christmas exists to remind us, year after year, that we are deeply loved, pursued, chosen, called. If the table spread and the Christmas tree speak to your soul and allow you to experience that truth more deeply, absolutely lean into those traditions. If they don’t, it’s okay to let them go. Find what reminds you of God’s incredible, scandalous love for you, in this moment of your life and surround yourself with that throughout the Christmas octave.

I can’t say yet whether or not we’ll have Swedish pancakes again tomorrow, or whether we’ll make them later this week, or whether they’ll wait to make another appearance until Easter. But I do hope that we will continue to lean into this long, drawn-out celebration of Christmas for a few more days, reaching and stretching and growing our hearts to fit the spiritual joy that is so big that it cannot be contained by one day alone.

How are you trying to remain anchored during this Christmas octave?

1. Diane is also not the only person to assume James is Jewish—we were wished a Happy Hanukkah this year while walking home from Easter Mass. (Yes, Hanukkah. Yes, he self-corrected to Passover by the end of the conversation.) We were unable to convince him that we were, in fact, Catholic and had, in fact, been at the same Easter Mass that he and his wife had attended. They were hard of hearing. It remains one of my favorite stories of 2023.

2. Brant Pitre’s series on the Jewish roots of Christianity convinced me to begin a masters degree in theology and serve as a strong anchor point for my own faith.

3. Christmas, obviously, is a joyful celebration that is so big and so important that it spills over into the rest of the week. But we see the same tension in Advent, in Lent, in Easter, or in any season (religious or secular) of ongoing focus.