Intermarried couples with children have long faced the “December dilemma,” the question of whether to celebrate Christmas, Chanukah or both.

Immortalized by The OC’s “Chrismukkah” and by jokes about Chanukah bushes, the holiday season brings to the fore the potential tensions that face multifaith families. With an intermarriage rate hovering at about 50 per cent since 1990, such conflicts aren’t uncommon. But not only the statistics are new. With the demographic changes comes a seismic shift in attitudes. What was once seen as a tragedy is now just another lifestyle choice in the age of autonomy.

But the celebration of Christmas by Jews transcends the delicate blending of religious customs that may be common for Jews who marry Gentiles. The general pull of the Yuletide season – songs, movies, decorations, food and treacly materialism cleverly sold as universal brotherhood – holds enchantment for many who are not even intermarried, but feel as if they’re “missing out” on something. For many Jews, Christmas envy doesn’t seem to burn off along with the eight days of oil.

Witness Cindy Chupack and her husband, both Jewish. Chupack was a writer and executive producer of the TV show Sex and the City. Flipping through the Pottery Barn catalogue, she recalled, in a 2006 article in the New York Times, being hit by a wave of desire to own a Christmas tree, complete with stockings and holly. This wasn’t about Christianity, mind you. It wasn’t about celebrating the birth of a saviour, or the belief that God is incarnate (considered idolatrous in Judaism). It wasn’t about centuries of proselytization, forced conversion and cross-stained blood, or flayed skin, empty tombs and Torquemada. Nor was it about Mother Teresa and the sheer power of faith to penetrate the darkest corners of humanity and redeem the world.

Rather, in Chupack’s words, after purchasing a tree and velvet stockings and attending her first gingerbread-house decorating party, she and her husband  “both love our winter wonderland. Some nights I put on our Starbucks Christmas CD, light a fire, turn on the tree and play with the different settings… and then I sit back and enjoy my first Christmas in all its kitschy splendour.” Her rationale for doing all this reflects how religious particularism is now seen as the enemy of enlightenment: “It’s nice to teach children that holidays can be done a la carte. Every religion, every culture has so many beautiful rituals and traditions to choose from. Maybe celebrating is a step toward tolerating.”  

But ordering pieces of disparate religious ritual like so many courses on a menu – contemporary samplers of Christianity and Judaism, with each new purchase “a la carte” – produces the ironic effect of weakening, and even dismantling, the traditions they claim to love.

For a moment I wondered, what would happen if we applied this mentality to other institutions in our life – say, for example, marriage. But given the staggering rate of adultery in the modern West, I quickly realized that this, too, is an idea whose time has come.