Irving the Snowchicken is coming to town

Forget Christmakkah and Festivus. Our interfaith holiday involves a magical rooster who fills the children's pants with presents.

By Christopher Noxon

Read more: Religion, Christmas, Jews, Christianity, Chicken, Holidays, Life

Salon

Dec. 22, 2007 | I've never been particularly religious. I've got Canadian Quakers on my dad's side and Midwestern Protestants on my mom's, but growing up in '70s and '80s Los Angeles, whatever spiritual yearnings I possessed were satisfied via a consuming passion for "Star Wars." My best friend Jimmy was an altar boy at a church where they prayed to a spooky guy on a cross. I was fine with Obi-Wan.

But then I grew up and fell in love with a Beverly Hills Jewess, and we got married by a cool Reform rabbi who, unlike my mother-in-law, didn't mind that my first name began with the word "Christ." And now we have three kids, who, by mysterious matriarchic law, became Jews the moment they touched down at Cedar's Sinai. All of which explains how I find myself a big goy surrounded by Jews. My kids go to a school called Temple Israel, where they're drilled in Hebrew and the demands of their religious calling (nothing too major, just tikkun alum -- heal the world). At school, there's a name for families like ours: interfaith. The three kids and the wife, they're the faithful. I'm the inter.

All of which is fine, really. Even as I stubbornly remain nonchosen, I love that my kids are part of such a deep and durable tradition. I love that they're soaking up the high value placed on learning and argument, jokes and food. I've even come to love Shabbat at my in-laws' every Friday. And while I don't think I'll ever understand gefilte fish, and I've been to a few bar and bat mitzvahs that contradicted everything I believe about decency and goodness, on balance I have no regrets about being the flaming shaygetz father figure of a proud Jewish household.

Still, the interfaith equation does get complicated. The biggest hitch emerged in our carefree pre-parenthood years, back when our fiercest arguments were over where to get takeout. Even then, we'd hit a rough patch a few weeks near the end of the year. It was like clockwork. On the day after Thanksgiving we entered the Season of the Perpetual Bicker. The particulars are too boring to detail here, but let's just say we experienced irreconcilable differences over a holiday whose name shall not be mentioned. Turns out my lovely bride not only didn't celebrate this holiday but kind of hated it.

She was unmoved by the irresistible aroma of fresh-cut pine and unconvinced that decorating our very own miserable/sweet Charlie Brown sapling with glass balls and paper ornaments was a cultural, not religious, tradition. She failed to see the charm in my abiding love for Claymation Rudolph or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir holiday album.

I began to yearn for the tree, the cookies, the stockings. I had vivid sense memories of tiptoeing out of my bedroom in footsie pajamas, sneaking into the living room to behold the glittering, obscene pileup. As an adult, I couldn't write off all of that. I didn't mind ditching Easter and had no trouble donning a kippah every Friday or spinning a dreidel on Chanukah or reading aloud from that wacky Passover booklet about pestilence and frogs. But I found I couldn't go the extra step of abandoning the holiday whose name shall not be mentioned.

I began discussing our holiday plans with the neutrality and good cheer of a Fox News pundit. While my fellow besieged goyim got fired up in defense of God and faith and family, I felt the righteous call to defend the sanctity of superficial crap. I never gave two shits about tinsel before I got married. Now I wanted to coat our house in it.

And so we ended up where all bickering interfaith couples end up: couples therapy.

My wife picked the shrink. She told me not to make a big deal out of the fact that the shrink was Jewish. What, we should waste our time with one of the three non-Jewish psychiatrists in L.A.? And so we spent six sessions tromping recklessly through a minefield known in interfaith circles as "The December Dilemma." Never before have the emotional dimensions of a tangerine in the toe of a sock ever been so fully explored. I demanded respect for the tangerine. She demanded respect for going to the movies and eating Chinese food.

Eventually, we arrived at our bottom lines. No matter how superficial or secular the holiday had become, she argued, it was still Christ's birthday, and my beloved just couldn't be party to that. No tree, no mistletoe, no Santa. I took stock and realized ... none of that mattered to me, either. I didn't care about the trimmings -- they were mostly tacky and meaningless anyway. What mattered to me, as both a grown-up and a parent, was the make-believe. When I boiled it down, all I wanted was someone magical to break into our house and leave us cool stuff.

Next page: Late one night, a stranger appeared on our doorstep. It was a chicken