HADLEY FREEMAN ON

December: aneternal battleover decorations “ ”

THERE’S CONFLICT BREWING IN HADLEY FREEMAN’S HOUSE THIS HOLIDAY SEASON

ecember: a time of simple joys and contented cosiness. Or, if you live in my kind of household, an eternal battle over the decorations. I am Jewish. My partner is not. ‘How lovely,’ you are no doubt thinking. ‘Your children will grow up with two cultures. What a delightfully modern set up.’ And most of the time it is. Every spring, I look after the Passover duties and he sets up the Easter egg hunt, and every autumn I explain again to the children what Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are, and he tries to stop making bored faces. So multicultural! But December is complicated.

Let’s just get the obvious stuff out of the way: clearly Christmas beats Hanukkah. Even on the Jewish calendar Hanukkah is a pretty minor holiday (it ain’t no Yom Kippur, let alone a Rosh Hashanah), and putting it next to Christmas is like putting a local chip shop next to McDonald’s. We Jews know when we’re beaten. But! That doesn’t mean we won’t put up a fight.

Every December is the battle of the holiday decorations. On the one hand, there’s me, scattering dreidels and chocolate coins around the house, in the hope of convincing

Dmy kids that a strange minor holiday about oil is actually really extremely fun. And on the other, there’s my husband, who insists on buying a giant Christmas tree every year and then decorating it with his hoarder sized collection of ornaments. My menorah glows brightly in the front window, but he gazumps me by “Mym glowsbri inthewin buthegaz mebyhan hanging a h wreath on the front door. And to be honest, it gets a little hard to find my dreidels after he’s draped the whole house with tinsel and ivy. This then leads to the delightful passive aggressive exchange of muttered remarks such as: ‘It’s only a minor holiday, awreatho anyway, why do you ‘You’re an atheist!’ care?’ frontdoor If you listen closely, it almost sounds like the jingle of bells. Afte de of this, compromises have been and they can be summed up in one w dles. Candles are the common deno between Christmas and Hanukkah, and we fill the house with them. Then I move the dreidels on top of the ivy, maybe accidentally knock the wreath off the door when leaving the house and, man, you should SEE the size of my menorah this year. n JOURNALIST HADLEY FREEMAN WRITES FOR THE GUARDIAN AND IS THE AUTHOR OF FOUR BOOKS