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What's a good Jew like me doing in a synagogue on Christmas day, playing Christmas carols to a host of Yuletide choristers?
What has happened to me since the days of my youth, when I feared that if I uttered the word "Jesus," the wrath of my God would be upon my head?
In elementary school, I dreaded the approach of Christmas and the mandatory participation in the choirs. I'd hide myself in the row behind Alan, a strapping young fellow, and carefully mouth all the key words I felt might compromise my status in my own religion – Jesus, Mary, saviour, manger, herald angels. Sometimes, outside school, I would catch myself reflexively singing snatches from the verboten carols, and this, too, sent me into spasms of guilt and fear.
I was always chosen for a major role in the annual production of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. This play struck me as an exception to the usual holiday activities. I liked the grinchiness of Ebenezer Scrooge because he gave voice to some of my sentiments about the season.
There was a certain irreverence that resonated with me, and I did not feel completely like a double agent when I played Bob Cratchit's wife.
I managed to be evasive when the talk at recess turned to "what have you asked Santa to bring you for Christmas?" If I happened to appear in January with new school supplies, or a new item of clothing, I'd produce a non-committal grunt when asked if Santa had brought this gift.
I did not dare confess that I didn't celebrate Christmas, and I never attempted to explain our festival of Hanukkah. Our traditional observance involved a family dinner with potato latkes and small gifts of chocolate coins plus a symbolic sum of Hanukkah gelt (money). I couldn't compete with the recitations of lists of presents Santa had bestowed on my schoolmates.
I came to accept that, from mid-November until the school break in December, I'd be a hidden Jew, furtive in my efforts to avoid overt participation in festive activities.
My anxieties weren’t founded on any parental admonitions or prohibitions, but on an awareness that I was a sort of imposter and interloper.
I had no elevated spiritual thoughts or emotions as I sang about the baby in the manger. It was with shameful choral insincerity that I lied about my love for a lord that wasn’t my lord.
When schoolmates wished me a Merry Christmas, my retort was, “You too,” rather than an echo of the same greeting. I refused to say the C-word.
My antipathy for the holiday season was rooted in an evil that persisted until 1965, when Pope Paul VI partly exonerated the Jews for the death of Jesus.
I recall 1960, Winnipeg, Grade 3: My Catholic friend Sharlene had me over to her house after school one day, and in serious yet accusatory tones, with tears streaming down her cheeks, asked me why my “people” had killed Christ?
Defenceless and mortified, I didn’t know how to console her, and I certainly couldn’t deny all the heinous things she described as having been wreaked on Jesus. Seeing that I was stupefied, Sharlene became rather sympathetic, telling me she felt sorry for me that I didn’t have Jesus in my life. I left her home engulfed with despair because my “people” had killed her lord.
Yet this week, I am practising my repertoire of carols – singing joyfully as I prepare for the Christmas concert at my local homeless shelter.
I have lived through years of holiday concerts at my children’s schools, accompanied a myriad of choirs for Christmas concerts and wrapped more Christmas presents each season than all the Hanukkah presents I’ve wrapped over a lifetime. “Merry Christmas” slips off my tongue in earnest.
No, I have not converted to Christianity. But I have embraced the good spirit, the generosity, the hopefulness and positive wishes that come with the season.
In 2011, Pope Benedict XVI issued a full exoneration of the Jews, and the tremendous relief of a historical sense of guilt freed me to enjoy the warmth, neighbourliness and merriment of the season, which I embrace as a sort of secular humanist event.
We have always celebrated only the Jewish holidays in our home, raising our children as Jews, while helping them to acknowledge the wonderful good spirit of Christmas with their Christian friends.
On Christmas Eve, I will be at the piano in the dining room of the Out of the Cold program at Holy Blossom synagogue, passionately churning out carols. Merry Christmas to all.
Gilda Berger lives in Toronto.