Santa Claus, Jewish identity, and me

The first time I told my daughter the truth about Santa Claus, she was three years old.

She came home from child care full of excitement and anxiety, hoping, hoping, hoping she’d been good enough for Santa to come. We’d never really talked about Santa in our Jewish-Quaker household, though we did visit my in-laws for a secular Christmas celebration each year. But I looked at my child now, full of earnest hope and anxiety, and I knew I didn’t want her to see her Christmas gifts as some sort of reflection on her character or worth.

So at bedtime I said, tentatively, “You know, some people believe Santa Claus is real. Others believe he’s a story.” Saying something was a story was a common way of explaining things in our household. As the child of two writers, my daughter already knew that stories were important, even precious. To say something was a story was to describe it, not to diminish it.

This time, though, when I said Santa might be a story, my daughter looked right at me and said, “That’s not true.”

Faced with such strong conviction and will to believe, I didn’t press the matter, not then.

And I did quietly--if a little uneasily--relabel one of my husband and mine’s Christmas gifts to be from Santa, rather than us.

Lots of Jewish kids grow up wishing they could celebrate Christmas, but I don’t remember doing so, maybe because I grew up in a town with enough Jewish kids that schools closed not just for Christmas, but also for Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and the first couple of days of Passover. On the playground Jewish and Christian kids fiercely debated whose winter holidays delivered more presents, but the idea that we all should celebrate one or the other wasn’t even on the table.

Photo courtesy of Canva/YekoPhotoStudio

I did grow up believing in Santa Claus, though. I listened for sleigh bells Christmas Eve, opened a token gift beside a neighbor’s tree Christmas Day, and accepted without bitterness that of course Santa Claus couldn’t deliver any gifts to our house, seeing as we were Jewish and all. My family’s Hanukkah gifts were numbered by day and laid out on top of my father’s oversized stereo system, where my brother and sister and I could try to guess at their contents as we shook them and tried to see through the wrapping paper.