Christmas Message? Same as the Hanukkah message. Two Holidays at the Turn of the Year? No Problem. (The Pagans celebrated Winter Solstice Too.)

Here we are again, smack up against the cultural-commercial vortex of the American calendar. The Holiday Season! (Unrecognizable without the exclamation mark.) The consumer peak of the Western World. The Frenzy. The celebration of plenty with religious sidecart, to which formal, semi-formal, or occasional heed of some sort must be paid before the next party, or obligatory visit, or round of gift dispersals takes over the agenda. The next round of eggnog; Irish coffee; mulled cider; special holiday wine.

Personally, I’m down for all these rites of consumption. Fancy cheese and chocolate, panetone, mousse, Hanukkah geld or Christmas cannolis.

But what do you do if your own little family, the one you personally instituted, is founded on two religious traditions? If your own little nuclear cluster is a so-called interfaith family.

Should we celebrate Christmas or Hanukkah at home? Whose birth family celebration should we attend? The one with the hyperactive candelabra with holes for nine slinky candles and the prayer whose words the non-Jewish spouse learns by heart, though what the syllables mean remains a challenge? Or the one the non-Christian spouse learns can go on seemingly non-stop for weeks, with a hunk of forest hogging the living room, and a hyperbolic electric bill for all that extra lighting?

Families likes these (like ours) are the premise for Living Page stories on what the media insists on calling “the December Dilemma.” The wringing of generational hands. Children have to be brought up one way or another, don’t they? So they won’t be “confused.”

Seriously?

Any child who gets ‘confused’ by being plied with presents and sweets at one holiday festivity, and snowed under by toys and candy at the next, must have the mental flexibility of a parking meter.

Children don’t get confused by getting presents, seeing a lot of their grandparents, mixing with cousins, playing with plastic spinning tops one night, and being introduced to bizarre rituals involving leaping lords, dancing ladies, and two au pairs in a partridge tree (whatever all that stuff is about) the next night. Possibly they get hyper and a little over-stimulated. But children, as a rule, need more people time and less screen time these days. Any excuse to get together is a good one.

So whose year-end holiday traditions should interfaith families follow? Seriously, folks, where’s the dilemma? Do them both, naturally. The kids get more presents, more candy, more attention from the adults in their lives.
And for the parents? They get to drive all over creation, going from one house to another, taking in the sights in Midtown, Rockefeller Center and the Metropolitan Museum for half a week. Followed by Christmas dinner and carol singing out on Long Island.

My wife Anne (the Jewish spouse) hates “the December Dilemma.” At home we addressed the needs of the bilateral festivities by putting the Hanukkah candles in the dining room and the sacrificial tree, symbolical axis mundi of the pagan solstice festival, in the living room. We eat latkes on the first night of Hanukkah, seasoned with a little blood via hand-grating the potatoes. We exchange Christmas presents some evening, or morning (almost never on December 25th), whenever it’s convenient to our travel schedule.

We traveled to nostalgic New York, Long Island branch, to spend the day of days with my parents in the house where I grew up. We journeyed to the Bronx on the same trip to spend time with my wife’s parents and watch a nostalgic video treatment of “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” which Anne says goes beyond mere warm-and-wonderful nostalgic to non-denominationally entertaining. Actually, I think she’s jealous. I know I am.

Our lives may not be figments of Dylan Thomas’s absurdly fertile poetic imagination, but we each carry on the traditions of our own pretty damn decent family backgrounds. Our children are adults, but the Christmas tree is still at one end of the combination living-dining room, and Hanukkah candles burn with sweet conscientiousness at the other for all eight nights. This year the angel chimes (a Christmas tradition) kept them company at the end.

I cannot imagine doing without them, putting them away as if they were merely (to borrow a scriptural phrase) “childish things.”’

Some customs, practices, rituals, habits — whatever you want to call them — come from sources deeper even than our individual religio-cultural backgrounds.

We do these things because they’re part of who we are. Who we have become.