By Marie Mulvenna

Whatever Christmas is to most people, ‘tis not “the season to be jolly” for Jews.

Nothing even remotely compares with Christmas “for underlining the continuing apartness from mainstream America that many Jews feel,” writes Harold Ticktin in the December issue of U.S. Catholic.

In his article, titled “A Jew Looks at Christmas,” Ticktin considers the tremendous material impact of the holiday on the business world, noting that 35 percent of all non-food retail sales occur in the five week period around Thanksgiving and Christmas. “If the Christmas season sneezes, the economy catches cold,” he stated.

The attempt of many Jewish families, including his own, is to tell children that the eight days of Hanukah replace the gift-giving side of the holiday, an effort he terms “more than a little dubious.”

“Kids are primal consumers, not to be put off from one big blast by a series of smaller ones. They sense the real thing and they are right, at least in material terms. Ticktin notes that the sense of "apartness" Jews feel at Christmas is somewhat relieved in the last 25 years with the creation of the state of Israel.

He describes December 24 and 25 as “the most difficult days,” saying “a quiet almost like the moment before battle settles over the city as one senses the rest of society girding up for the big one. Even within the confines of your own home, you feel rather like a man arriving at a party on the wrong day. You twiddle, maybe go to a movie (which of course is empty) or, as I did once, go to Midnight Mass to get the sense of pageant.”

“Whatever you do under these circumstances,” Ticktin says, “You feel out of it.”

With 200 million Americans observing Christmas, the six million Jews of the country have devised any number of plots for dealing with the material presence of Christmas, but “most of them fail, except for the small, very religious minority that succeeds in achieving complete repression.”

“For the rest of us,” says Ticktin, “the best we do is a kind of blunting – one might almost say a partial turning of the cheek.”

“What bothers me, as I watch television and listen to the radio in December, is the excessively romantic, over-optimistic exhortation to ‘make Christmas last forever,’ despite our easily observed human limitations.”

In the last half of December,” the writer notes, “the viewer is bombarded by program after program emphasizing the sweet light that is supposed to enter the individual consciousness and stay there until the next year’s celebration. It is the time of the ‘Christmas Spirit’ program.

“What happens during Christmas in America,” Ticktin says, “is an exaggeration of the romantic element to the detriment of religious observance generally. Particularly as the mass media bring the Christmas season to its final pitch, do I sense the romantic side of Christianity being blown out of proportion,” says Ticktin.

Jews do not look toward their most solemn holiday (Yom Kippur) with romantic eyes, he says, “perhaps because we are such an ancient and disappointed people. We remember all the promises we made to ourselves in the past and how easily we break them.”

Jesus, who the writer considers a “first century rabbi,” showed a keen sense of the “frailties of real humans,” when he predicted that Simon Peter would betray him three times, but the real spirit of Jesus has been allowed to “slip away into the maudlin grasp of the media.”

“I wonder in this time of ecumenism a little Jewish hard-headedness might not provide a wonderful antidote for the traditional honeyed days of December,” he says.