Today’s New York Times features this article about a Jewish mom who changed her reaction to her sons having a Christmas Tree over the holidays. (Here’s the link, just in case. My Jewish Sons Have a Christmas Tree, and I Need to Deal
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/24/opinion/christmas-hanukkah-divorce.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share)
Interfaith has information here about the new Lifetime holiday movie Mistletoe & Menorahs. In the movie, premiering December 7, a woman needs a crash course in Hanukkah before her Jewish boss’s holiday party and a Jewish guy wants to go all-out to impress his new girlfriend with his Christmas decorations.
Erin Gates’s Elements of Style blog is a wonderful resource for creative design and fashion ideas. Here is an image from her site that combines Hanukkah colors with a Christmas tree.
Thanks to the folks at Great Day Washington for this interview, which aired on December 24th.
Here is a link to some of the most unusual and innovative Christmas “trees” I have ever seen.
Thank you to Rachel Nania at WTOP for an enjoyable interview last week, and for this article on the WTOP website.
Typically, Christmas is represented by the colors red and green, and Hanukkah by blue and white, while silver and gold are the colors that celebrate the festive holiday season. Consider how your family’s home can incorporate all these colors – a fragrant evergreen wreath or tree, holly berries, a blue and white tablecloth, lights of all four colors, a shiny menorah – are just some of the ways that your home can showcase both Christmas and Hanukkah colors. You may also want to purchase or make some Christmas or Hanukkah table decorations that you use each year at the holiday’s family meals and invite children to draw pictures that use all the colors of the season.
For families that celebrate both Christmas and Hanukkah, Parents magazine has some suggestions for melding the holidays through food:
Just as Sophie and Tommy celebrate Christmas in different ways, so do all families. Over the next few months I will be posting ideas for family observances and celebrations. Today’s suggestion comes from the Parent Map website. Please share your family traditions too.
“One of our favorite holiday traditions is actually one that we saw being practiced in a friend’s home while we were visiting for the holidays. Each Christmas our friend’s mother writes down the big family moments that have happened throughout the year and reads them aloud after the family has finished opening their gifts. Now as adults, our friend and his siblings can go back and read these annual thoughtful journal entries and reminisce over all of the great family moments that they may not have remembered right away. And since the journal begins from the time that they were infants, they have plenty of treasured moments to recall each year!”
Two of my preferred sources for blank journals are Paper Source and, for a choice of journals from all over the world, Novica.
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