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Christmas Eve Reflections
2005

I was in CVS this week and asked the clerk where I might find Chanukah candles.  He said, “We have a whole Chanukah section between aisles 3 and 4”.  I found it, amid six full rows of Christmas lights, decorations, wrapping paper, and assorted Santa’s, crèches, and lawn ornaments, …3 one foot long shelves, no higher than my waist, with half a dozen gift bags decorated with menorahs, a few electric candles, and NO candles for our menorah.

I laughed out loud.  And then I was flooded with childhood memories, of feeling the outsider, of the tinny rendition of “I have a little dreidel” added as an afterthought at the Christmas concert, of being invited to my best girl friend’s house to look at the tree but never to decorate it or be there Christmas morning, of my sister Jodi and I decorating the rubber plant one year with construction paper chains while our parents were out, of the feeling of having one’s nose pressed up to the glass, looking in at a holiday that I wasn’t part of…

Now, I know that some of you can relate – and some of us may be having a few moments tonight wondering “How is it my life turned out that I’m here at a 9/11 o’clock Christmas Eve service?”  I remember the sense of dis- ease I had many years ago watching our then 10 year daughter Alyssa play Mary in the Christmas pageant, and not just because she was carrying someone’s brand new baby!

As you all know, this year, the first night of Chanukah begins at sundown on Christmas and ends of New Year’s Day.  It’s the first time that’s happened since 1959.  It poses a challenge for those of us who come from “interfaith families”, a description that would apply to many if not most of us.

The reality is that Chanukah is a minor Jewish religious holiday.  As an article in the New York Times stated last week:

“No classic Hanukkah films or ballets were inspired by it.  There is no “Miracle on Hester Street” no “”Radio City Hanukkah Spectacular”.  Jewish songwriters have been more inclined to compose Christmas songs, including…White Christmas, Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire, and We Need a Little Christmas.”  White Chanukah or We Need A Little Chanukah were probably never even considered. 

Some of us celebrate both Jewish and Christian holidays in our homes, and tomorrow, at sunset, may even in the middle of the ham and the sweet potatoes, pause to light the menorah and say the traditional blessings.  We are committed to commemorating both traditions in our lives and in our children’s and grandchildren’s lives.

I think it is important that we take the time to remember the lessons of both of these stories, and that we not conflate them into a single holiday.  I found an Internet site called Chrismukkah.com.  They define it as the merry mish-mash, one-size-fits-all, unisex, alternative, non-denominational, non-judgmental, non-polluting, all-inclusive, sustainable, holistic, X-treme hybrid holiday.   

The only real historical link between the two holidays is that one of King Herod’s ten wives was the great-great-great grand daughter of Mattathias.  Mattathias began the revolt that leads to the Chanukah story.  Herod, as we just heard in the Luke reading, was king when Jesus was born and in the Matthew gospel, calls for the massacre of the babies.  I’m not sure if their relationship is synchronistic or just ironic.

To briefly recap the story:  In 167 b.c.e., a Greek leader named Antiochus attempts to institute a Greek state religion.  He orders the takeover of the temple in Jerusalem, has a statute of Zeus built on its altar, and calls for ritual sacrifice there and in other Jewish temples throughout the countryside.  Mattathias kills the first Jew who comes forward to offer a sacrifice as well as a state official, and he and his five sons are forced to escape to the hills.  Together, they organize first a small band of rebels to resist Antiochus, which grows to a 6000 person army that retakes Jerusalem and the Temple.  Three years from the day that Zeus was erected,  the 25th of Kislav, Judas Maccabeus and his followers rededicated and purified the Temple in an 8 day celebration.  Chanukah has been celebrated more or less continuously for 2,169 years.   

Chanukah is the first recorded battle for religious freedom and against efforts to have a minority religion assimilated into a larger whole, reason enough for us as Unitarian Universalists to celebrate it.  But it is in the legend that grew up in the 2nd century of the common era that I think we can find our greatest inspiration. 

You know that legend:  according to a very short passage in the Talmud, the Maccabees came into the temple and after purifying it, went to relight the eternal flame.  They only had enough oil for one day.  Pressing new oil from the olive trees would take another week.  Miraculously the oil lasted for the entire eight days.  The Rabbis who wrote the Talmud transformed the telling of the history from a heroic military battle into a story of God’s miracle and grace to the Jewish people.  They moved it from a story based on the facts to a story based on the universal need for faith and hope and redemption. 

And that’s where I think the real stories of Christmas and Chanukah converge.  They are stories of miracles – the ordinary story of the poor unwed teenage mother and her older boyfriend cast off by society that becomes the miracle of the baby to be named “Emmanuel”: God is with us…the story of the ordinary drop of oil that lasts for eight days to show us that God’s will prevails…

The stories remind us that in the darkest of winters, in the physical world or in the dark parts of our souls, even the tiniest light can with faith become brighter and stronger, until the whole world is filled with that light once again – and that every human life, no matter how humble his or her beginnings, can indeed bless the entire world. 

The second of the three prayers of Chanukah says, Blessed are you, Lord, our God, sovereign of the universe Who performed miracles for our ancestors in those days at this time…

At THIS time, in THESE days, may we all be blessed with the miracles of this holiday season. 

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