I was tempted to have this be about how the month of December taught me more about love growing up than almost anything else. Not because of gifts - though they were nice to receive. It wasn't even because of seeing family although we did that too. It was because my parents balanced December in a way that always made me wonder why people would ask how they "handled it" or what they did about the "December dilemma."
And it is true that December taught me about love because my dad put up the Christmas tree. Each year my Jewish father would take the box up from the basement. He would lay it out and before he could get too far into his project my mother would take us out to a movie so we wouldn't learn any "new words." But that is not what stays in my memory - that isn't what feels important. It isn't even that my father refused to allow lights on the tree because he was afraid of fire - because he was convinced we would burn the house down if we put lights on our artificial tree - and as best I can tell we had the same tree my whole childhood.
And I have so many images of December - of my father putting up that tree and my mother scraping wax off the menorahs. She would melt the wax and dig it out and make sure we each had a menorah fresh and clean for lighting candles. She never claimed Judaism as her tradition, she was raised Catholic and would say that it never left her. But she also said it was our tradition and she was going to make sure each holiday was observed and held in the respect it deserved. She never claimed Chanukah as Christmas but she claimed it for what it was - a holiday of revolution, resistance and light. And in preparing the menorahs, making latkes, making sure we read part of the story each night, she claimed it for my father. She loved it because she loved him, She loved it because she loved us.
But December taught me about love because of something else. It taught me about love because the December after my mother died. The first December I was home from college. The first Christmas without my mother. The first Chanukah without my mother. I received two gifts. A reminder from my father over the phone of how to clean wax out of a menorah, directly from my mother's notes and when I got home the menorahs in our home, the dreidels were still out because my father had done his best to be my mother (even though by the time I arrived home Chanukah was over).
But there was something else. My father got out the Christmas tree and put it up. He didn't have to. He could have decided that because my mother was gone he no longer needed to do this for her. He could have made the choice to remove himself from the task that he had done out of love for her - he could have stepped away from this one tradition and no one would have questioned him.
But he did it.
He did it because had always done it out of love for my mother. He had carried her in his heart as he put up her tree, the family's tree, the tree that meant so much to her.
He did it because he knew that in coming home from college, having lost my mother so recently, I would need it. I would need to know that in losing her I wasn't losing her traditions, her story and her light as well.
My father taught me about love one December when he stepped outside of his own tradition and into my mother's story one last time so we wouldn't lose her and her tree all at once.
Shai Wise was raised in an interfaith family in NY and now lives in a multifaith, multiracial family in WI. He has served as congregational clergy and in chaplaincy. He is a Red Sox fan who will cheer for the Brewers in a pinch.
