Christmas

It’s not easy being Jewish during the Christmas season, especially if you’re a kid. Chanukah is great, don’t get me wrong. Presents for eight nights in a row. Lighting the candles and watching them flicker in the menorah until they gradually fade away. And I’m a big fan of the latke. But compared to Christmas? Really?

Imagine, then, what my son Luke had to contend with, growing up Jewish and having an older brother who got to celebrate Chanukah and Christmas while he celebrated only the Festival of Lights. And it was all my fault. I married a non-Jew, had a son with him and got divorced. Then I met my true love (Luke’s father) and created our modern nuclear family. Three Jews and a mixed-breed (sorry, Craig), who marched in a Christmas pageant at his father’s church wearing the robe of a king – the same year he was deep in preparation for his bar mitzvah. Holiday time in our household was always a bit fraught.

Most always, I find nature as my inspiration for arrangements and décor, thus green becomes my “MO” for all things fresh, natural, and beautiful. Green is nature’s neutral – found in different hues and shades in every wood, vale, forest and dale! Here are a few tips on “thinking green” for the Holidays and year round decorating as well!

I always like to have a green base to build from when making an arrangement, tablescapes, or even holiday décor. Choose your greenery wisely – it will be your support and skeleton, your contrasting tone, and your “roux” that brings the arrangement together.

Use what is in season…for the Holidays, I like the traditional greens like holly, boxwood, cypress, cedar, and magnolia. Add some pizzazz by contrasting shades of green like the dark of the holly and magnolia (use those velvety brown backs as well), lighter green from cypress and blue greens from cedar or junipers.

Baking season is in full swing and it seems that everywhere you turn there are cookies. Everyone loves biting into a sugary Christmas cookie. But I think the best part about cookies is making them yourself, and getting kids and even the adults involved. Baking batches of all different types of cookies is my specialty at Christmas. I bring them to parties at the office and share them with neighbors and friends. I always have some on hand for when people stop by to visit, which can happen quite often during the holidays.

There are so many ways to get involved in the holiday baking fun. Hosting a cookie-baking party is a great way to bring people together. Everyone can decorate their own cookies to eat and take home. Cookie swap parties also have recently become very popular. They offer the opportunity to show off your personal creations and share them with friends. The best part is guests get to go home with a variety of cookies all ready for them to share with their families.

I grew up singing Bach hymns before dinner.  We were all terrible singers, but it didn’t matter:  my mother trained us to sing in parts.  Children, adults and even teenage boys would toil our way through “Now Thank We All Our God.”  My mother wasn’t interested in musical quality, but in the virtues of complexity and genius.     

My mother, Carol Bly, is a writer, and it was always enormously clear to us that the focus of her passionate life was her study – no June Cleaver, she merely tolerated the kitchen.  She had started her married life with no knowledge of cooking whatsoever, doggedly making her way through The Joy of Cooking, which combined the dubious pleasures of simplicity with – well – simplicity.  She made the Joy’s recipes a bit more complex by eschewing white sugar and white flour and sprinkling wheat germ where possible.  The goal was not an aesthetic one, any more than our Bach choral performances were.

But during Christmas she would put aside her battered Joy of Cooking and take out that homage to fine cuisine, Julia Child’s 1967 Mastering the Art of French Cooking.  She had the same two-volume set as did Julie Powell’s mother, with a cover, in Powell’s description, “spangled with tomato-colored fleurs-de-lys.”  In Julie & Julia, Powell calls the recipes “incantatory.”  They were that, and fiendishly difficult too.  Perfect, from my mother’s point-of-view, for important days.  For a normal dinner, we might eat spaghetti, but Christmas had to be marked by true effort and a gesture toward culinary genius.