Growing up in the 60's my parents didn't talk much about religion or their religious upbringing. Later when I was an adult, my mom told me that her single mother had sent both her and her sister to the Methodist Church near their apartment in Minneapolis, but did not go with them. I also know that Mom, who was an accomplished singer had a lot of experience singing in churches of whichever denomination had the stronger chorus and best director. My father was a child of the depression and both his parents were alcoholics so I have my doubts if they ever took him to church. I understand that as a young man he considered studying religion before he turned to engineering. He was and still is the kind to be curious about how things work and the meaning of life. He eventually became a university physics professor who seemed more interested in gravity, black holes, history and politics than religion and God. He told me he had read the Bible when he was younger and we kept a copy in the house, but as far as I know it rarely if ever was taken down from the shelf. Dad told me it was the King James version and once or twice told me of parables like the Prodigal Son as well as ancient Greek Myths like Pandora's Box. He once explained to me that the difference between Protestants and a Catholics was that Catholics sinned during the week and went to church on Sunday. Perhaps because both my parents were progressives--my mother especially so, as she was on the California Democratic Central Committee--and they felt responsibility to expose me and my brother and sister to some kind of organized religion, they took us every Sunday to the Unitarian Church, which was an old ranch style house on about three or four acres. Mostly we sang songs like "If I had a Hammer," and "This Land is Your Land," and talked about philosophies of life. I never saw a bible or remember the name of Jesus being spoken. I remember a Sunday school teacher named Mr. Howard who taught us about atheism and agnosticism and how some people did and some people did not believe in a higher being. I had decided early on I was among the latter. There was a reverend of some sort who met with the adults in a separate building, I guess you could call it a chapel. I found out later it was more of an open forum on spiritual and social responsibility and planning political activism for the congregation. At the end of services the entire congregation would have a pot luck lunch and the kids would play outside. The church was shared with the local Jewish Synagogue which used the "chapel" as their temple to conduct services on Saturdays. I attended once as a guest of my Jewish neighbor friend, with my brother and sister. We embarrassingly broke into an uncontrollable fit of laughter during the service and were never asked back. We celebrated Christmas like most everyone else in our rural, predominantly white town, but it was a secular Christmas. We strung up lights, decorated the tree and believed that Santa Claus delivered at least some of the presents we found in the morning. My mother was a trained musician, and all of us kids had music lessons, so there was a lot of boisterous singing around the upright on Christmas Eve, some of it Christmas Carols but mostly a lot of Beatles, Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary. There were no prayers and except for in the carols we sang, certainly never any mention of Jesus. My two Jewish cousins from southern California would always join us during the Christmas break, because my uncle was also a professor, of English and Theatre I believe, and he had the same two weeks off as my dad. We would alternate one year up north with us and one year down south with them. Those weeks every winter break are some of the greatest memories of my childhood. We would play board games and boggle and put together jigsaw puzzles when it was raining too hard to go outside. I remember one of the first things we would do when they arrived would be to put plastic bags on our feet to keep them dry from the snow, our warmest sweaters, and drive up the hill to cut down a Christmas tree from the tree farm. My Uncle is Jewish and he married my mother's sister, who converted when they married. They raised my two cousins as Jews, and on those years when Christmas and Hanukkah overlapped we would join them around the Menorah, light the candles and listen as my Aunt would recite the blessings in Hebrew. This was about as close as any of the Christian side of the family would get to formal religious ritual. After being allowed to open one gift and having our family sing along, the final Christmas Eve highlight would be Uncle reading "The Night Before Christmas" or "A Child's Christmas in Wales," in his expressive, deep radio broadcaster baritone, before shuffling us off to bed. The circumstance of my converted Aunt reciting the Hanukkah blessings in Hebrew and my born and raised Jewish Uncle reading the Christmas classics did not seem at all ironic. Years passed and we grew up, grew older, went to college, moved away, got married or didn't, had children and didn't, got divorced, and mostly all stayed in the California area, except for cousin Liz who moved to Tuscon and started a family. My brother Dave married a Chinese immigrant and they had a son who is in his first year of college now. Inevitably the responsibility of hosting the holiday gatherings was passed on to us and held at my sister's as she had the largest house to put everyone up. My sister and her wife, both white, had adopted four African American children, two sisters who were half Hispanic, and two boys, and during the course of their raising made efforts to provide them exposure to African and Afro-American culture and traditions--at least to the extent a couple of mothers of European descent can. One such tradition is Kwanzaa and on a couple of occasions when my family would stay over after Christmas, we would observe their ceremony. They even had me lead them in an African harvest song I knew that had an easy refrain the kids to sing. Today we will have 34 family and friends for dinner. The picture below is of all the third generation children, black, white and brown. My Aunt and Uncle and cousins will be here shortly for dinner and I've got to get going. I'm making my specialty Brussels Sprouts with garlic, shallots and Parmesan cheese. Uncle Don has promised to teach me how to use the "nether" regions of my throat to pronounce Chag Sameach, the proper greeting for Hanukkah. Thanks for reading my modern family holiday diary, maybe not that different from many other families these days. Merry Christmahanakwanzukkah to all and to all a good night!
Third generation again with Tuscon representative.
Fri Dec 26, 2014 at 10:47 AM PT: Here is a photo of me, aka Chef Moose, cooking the Brussels Sprouts and enjoying a pale ale from my home town. Also Uncle tutored me on the proper pronunciation of Chag Sameach and we both decided I would need more practice.