Celebrate your child's love of learning

© Wondertime

Making the holidays happy when yours is the only Jewish kid in school.

It was early December, our first holiday season in Wilmington, North Carolina. At theToys "R" Us register, a nice cashier asked my son, Jonah, who was 4, "What's Santa bringing you, sugar?"
"Nothing," said Jonah.
"Nothing?"

Jonah looked up at me, waiting for a response I didn't yet know how to make. I murmured, "Well, uh, we're-Jewish-we-don't-celebrate-Christmas-we-celebrate-Hanukkah."

She stared at me, then broke into a weirdly enthusiastic smile. "Well, hon," she said, "you're the first Jewish people I've ever met!"

Jonah, my husband, Robert, and I had just moved from New York City to Wilmington. We went from a land of bagel stores on every corner to a land of about 500 Jewish families in a population of 95,000. We now lived in a place where the Yellow Pages listed Christian plumbers, Amen Restorations, and Christian karate. Suddenly we were the Other. Jonah seemed unaware of this, but I knew he would be the only Jewish child in his entire elementary school.

Jonah has the personality of a cruise ship director (he generally views a trip to the park as an opportunity to network), so he came home from kindergarten talking about all his new friends, who had the most Yu-Gi-Oh cards, and how Pete had burped his ABCs up to the letter Q. Maybe the other kids didn't care.

Then one day he told me, "Jesus was God."
I said Jews don't believe this.
"Well, I do."

This was it, I thought — the kids were getting to him. I was haunted by my father's stories: He had grown up in the only Jewish family in a small South Dakota town, and said that December 25 made him feel confused and alone. We had already joined one of the two small temples in town. Now our mission expanded to Identifying Jewish Heroes. We scanned a book of famous baseball players for Jews. "Sandy Koufax!" I exclaimed. "He was Jewish."

"Joe DiMaggio was better," he condescended, then added, "Jeff didn't know what Hanukkah was. I said we celebrate Christmas and Hanukkah."
"We just celebrate Hanukkah."
"Well, I celebrate Chrismukkah," he said.

I was about to get into a doomed theological battle when Robert broke in: "Jonah, I know that you may want to be like the other kids. But it's okay to be a little different. We're all a little different."

It was my husband's finest moment. He was right. Jonah might be Jewish, but in his class Diana was a lefty, Horatio spoke only Portuguese, and Jonathan was 6 years old and already 5 feet tall.

"He's gigantic!" said Jonah.

"There you go," said Robert.
"Alec's from Paraguay!"
"See?" said Robert. "No one's quite like anyone else."

In late November the public school curriculum included a Winter Festival, which revolved around reindeer, Santa, and elves. I joined a small battalion of mothers from our temple, unofficial sentries for Hanukkah. One mother brought a frying pan into her daughter's school and made latkes as she told the story of Hanukkah. I brought dreidels and bags of chocolate gelt for Jonah's class. "There was this temple," I started to tell them, uninspired and nervous. The kids started to fidget.

Suddenly Jonah was standing beside me with pertinent (if factually debatable) points about the battle: "There were 49 Maccabees and 100 Greeks, but the Maccabees still won." We passed around a couple of menorahs, including one that he had made. "You put the candles here," he said.

By now the kids were all crowding around to see, forcing the teacher to chide, "Down in front!" We divided the kids into groups to play dreidel. "Jonah," I said, "show your friends how." He nodded, wearing a noble expression. Now he was Dreidel Counselor.

I felt my worry melt. Jonah knew something that he could share with his classmates. He could explain another way of being in the world. "Thank you, Jonah," the kids chimed at the end of class. He smiled, and ate a piece of chocolate gelt.