* * Enjoying Christmas dinner with family

Like so many people around us, my family had Christmas Eve dinner at mom's house. I'm guessing, though, that ours was a little bit different than most.

Mom and dad live in Christiansburg, in the same house where I grew up. They have been there for over 50 years now. They have done an excellent job keeping up with maintenance on the house and today it looks better than ever. However, during this holiday season, there were no decorations or lights visible from the outside. The reason is that my family is Jewish.

My wife, daughter, and I arrived shortly after my older brother, who was busying himself in the other room reading a book. Mom had invited another friend to share dinner with us, a Jewish widow from Blacksburg. We sat together in the living room discussing issues of interest while mom put the finishing touches on dinner.

Dad mentioned that he had recently purchased a supply of home heating oil that he hoped would take him through the entire winter season. He is a committed conservationist and is motivated to reduce his consumption of energy. I mentioned that I had recently commissioned an energy audit for our house and suggested to him that he look into that as well. I promised to send him information.

Because my parents and their friend are now in their 80s, healthcare is always an issue. The friend spoke about the treatments that her husband received for cancer during the many years before he died. She said that if they had not been completely covered by insurance, she would be in a precarious financial position today.

We had just begun our discussion about that when Mom called us into the dining room, where for no reason at all, the males sat at one end of the table and the females at the other. Mom lit the Hanukkah candles, and led us in the recitation of the prayer:

“Baruch Atah Adonai Eloheinu Melech HaOlam, asher kidshanu b’mitzvotav v’tzivanu l’hadlik ner shel Hanukkah. Blessed are Thou, O Lord Our God, Ruler of the Universe, Who has sanctified us with His commandments and commanded us to kindle the lights of Hanukkah.”

The Jewish calendar is different from the Christian calendar, the former being a lunar cycle and the latter being on a solar cycle. Jewish months are 29 days long and the year has 354 days, with an extra month added every two or three years to offset the 11 day lag relative to the solar year. So, the Jewish holidays dance around a bit relative to the Christian calendar.

The eight days of Hanukkah are almost always in December, sometimes coincident with Christmas and sometimes not. It turned out, this Christmas Eve was the fifth day of Hanukkah. So there were five candles lit in the menorah, along with the “shamus” which is the lead candle which is used to light the rest.

The meal consisted of brisket, potato latkes, cooked carrots, cooked cabbage, and applesauce. Mom is a terrific cook, and it always amazes me how she can produce so much incredibly great food in her small kitchen. She also baked a chocolate cake with chocolate icing that she shaped in the form of a dreidel, the toy spinning top that Jewish kids play with during the Hanukkah holiday.

After dinner, we lingered around the dining room table and continued our discussion about health care and other political matters, as the candles burned down and finally exhausted themselves. Dad seemed particularly flummoxed by his perception that so many people in this country seem to consistently vote against their own economic well-being, principally by not supporting a national healthcare system. Someone made the observation that it was difficult for us to have an insightful discussion about many of these issues because all of us seemed to be on the same side. Judaism is by far the smallest of the world's major religions. As liberal Jews in Southwest Virginia, we seemed to be in a small school of fish swimming in a huge ocean of conservative Christianity.

As our evening came to a close, I think either consciously or subliminally, all of us realized how fortunate we were to live in a country and in an era when we could all celebrate and worship as we choose, whether liberal, moderate, or conservative and whether Jew, Christian, Hindu, Muslim, or Buddhist… or, for that matter, none of the above. We drove homeward down my parents’ street and enjoyed the twinkling, colorful lights of their neighbors.