Christmas Music and Judaism

Photo by Raquel Reyes.

So many of us barely notice the words of Christmas carols anymore. They play in the grocery store, on the radio, in the background of commercials. Their ubiquity breeds annoyance, for some, and a kind of numbing for most. If we do pause in the middle of our errands, though, and listen, unexpected themes emerge. The Christmas songs that seem to stick, to endure from one December to the next, are shot through with an odd undercurrent of sadness. Think of the nostalgia of “White Christmas.” Its slow melody, the longing for an idyllic tradition that may or may not have ever existed, the wistful, hopeful second-person— it’s all strangely, terribly sad, a melancholy visitation on a season of joy. Except, of course, that’s far from the only example. Across the genre of the secular Christmas carol, the same fears crop up: what if Christmas is wrong? What if it doesn’t square with our childhood memories, or doesn’t match the version of the holidays we see in commercials? What if we’re somehow shut out from the communal celebration, or what if we’re allowed in, but are separated from a loved one? 

“Across the genre of the secular Christmas carol, the same fears crop up: what if Christmas is wrong?”

The examples go on as long as the Spotify playlists. “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” when you think about it, is a terribly sad song, about exclusion and isolation, and its happy ending and upbeat melody can’t quite mask that strange story. “Let it Snow” is packed with descriptions of wintertime deprivation and fear, with Christmas cheer providing a kind of fragile buffer. “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” mentions “scary ghost stories,” an odd infusion of fear in an almost cloyingly upbeat song, and then injects that dose of nostalgia: “— And tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago.” 

“But these hints of sadness within the songs suggest something else. Jews haven’t written Christmas songs as a way to assimilate. Rather, they’re strange, complex expressions of grief, fear, and longing.”

There are other instances: “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” carries a hint of threat, a fear of not being good enough for the glories of the season. “Last Christmas” details the high expectations and easy disappointment of the Christmas season and even “All I Want for Christmas is You,” is all about, well, wanting— wanting love, wanting to be in the presence of a loved one at this all-important time. But what ties “White Christmas,” “Rudolph,” “Let it Snow,” and “Most Wonderful Time of the Year” together is this: along with an abundance of other beloved (or detested) carols, they’re all written by Jews. It’s a fact that American Jews tend to enjoy pointing out, like a little inside joke, a measure of our ability to assimilate into mainstream American culture or else an instance of sly Jewish humor— one of us, the jokes hint, managed to slip through the cracks. But these hints of sadness within the songs suggest something else. Jews haven’t written Christmas songs as a way to assimilate. Rather, they’re strange, complex expressions of grief, fear, and longing. Collectively, these themes have flooded into the genre as a whole, causing artists of all stripes— including others who are excluded from the mainstream capitalist Christmas idyll— to work them into their music.

Jews have plenty of reasons to feel nostalgic or homesick when it comes to Christmas. Like other religious minorities in the U.S., we rarely get a chance to spend holidays with our loved ones. In fact, in most of the country, Jewish and Muslim students and employees must miss work or school to observe holidays. At my university, one of the most heavily Jewish in the country, we received no days off for even Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah. On some Jewish holidays, observant Jews are not permitted to use electricity or write, making it even easier to fall behind in the midst of a busy school or workweek. When pressed about these problems, school administrators and others with power over these decisions often provide a telling response: if we give the Jews a day off, we’ll have to give them other holidays too, and we’ll have to let all the other minorities get days off for their holidays! So, like other religious minorities, we have to make difficult and often expensive decisions about whether to spend important days with our loved ones, or whether it’s worth it to mark them in any significant way. Many of us see our families on Christmas instead, when almost everyone gets a chunk of time away from work. It’s this odd set of conditions that leads us to Jewish Christmas, that proud, storied tradition of Chinese food and melancholic carols. The only way to deal with a set of ironic conditions is to celebrate when we’re able, in celebrations tinted with irony.

“The homesickness of our Christmas songs carries a new urgency. ”

The feelings of nostalgia and exclusion are more potent than ever as 2019 gives way to 2020. Far-right and white-supremacist rhetoric becomes a more visible and accepted part of the American political landscape every day, giving young Jews and our Muslim cousins reasons to fear as we never have in our lifetimes. The Forward reported in November that, in spite of a slight decrease in anti-Jewish hate crimes in 2018, the crimes reported were far more likely to be violent: we now bear the memory of a series of deadly shootings in our religious and communal spaces. And, of course, this fits into a pattern of hate crimes and violence against Muslim, Black, Latino, and LGBTQ Americans. Thus, America, our place of uncertain but necessary refuge, begins to seem as distant a dream as Irving Berlin’s “Christmases Long Long Ago.” Furthermore, as young Jews become increasingly alienated from the state of Israel and the idea of Jewish statehood generally, the homesickness of our Christmas songs carries a new urgency. We are alienated not only from our own country or from Israel, a country we have been told is our homeland – including by a president who seems to think that Jewish Americans are all merely Israeli visitors— but from our own families, at times, given the generational nature of the bitter debate over Israel. 

And so, unsure how to express these fears and sadnesses head-on, we’ll do it obliquely, like our ancestors did before us. There’s a towering wall of Christmas commercials and candies and carols every year. These strange lyrics invite us in, winkingly. In the discord of a Christmas carol, some of us can glimpse ourselves.

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Eleanor Stern is a writer and teacher currently based in Eastern Europe. Her fiction and nonfiction have been featured in the Southern Humanities Review, the Tahoma Literary Review, and the London Magazine website.