Holidays bring a simple wish, a new awareness

THOMPSON E-mail: Click here

© St. Petersburg Times
published December 22, 2001

As I was pulling into my driveway Monday afternoon I noticed a man climbing a ladder next to one of the old-fashioned signs announcing Sunset Park. Was the sign broken, off-center, like one farther north that leans like the Tower of Pisa?

No, he was placing a Christmas wreath on it.

Not a surprise, after all. Our old neighborhood placed wreaths on a street sign on every corner. Some of the neighbors on my block did a lot of the work.

The Sunset Park wreath is particularly nice, but I wondered, as I did when I lived in Bayshore Beautiful, if we are enough aware that not everyone in our neighborhoods celebrates Christmas.

When I got home, I found in the mail a copy of my free subscription to the New York Observer. Anne Roiphe, one of their editorial writers I really like, wrote about being Jewish during the Christmas season. "Jewish identity in America still gets the December shakes," she writes. "I suspect that will always be so."

Now, of course, intellectually we know that not everyone in Tampa or anyplace else celebrates Christmas. Yet do we act on it?

I was born into a Christian family and raised as a Methodist. But my daughter's father is Jewish, from a Conservative family, no less, strictly Kosher (unless you were eating in a Chinese restaurant where shrimp became acceptable). Yet while his parents did not allow a Christmas tree when he was a kid, every Christmas Eve an uncle stomped on the roof of their Long Island house and entered dressed as Santa Claus. Perhaps because my daughter's father was not allowed a tree at Christmas, he always bought the biggest tree that would fit under the 12-foot living room ceiling.

Christmas morning ritual was Nova Scotia lox and bagels and opening presents. It still is. When the man who is now my husband, an Episcopalian, and I fly to North Carolina to be with my daughter on Christmas Eve day, we will stop first at Einstein Bagels.

While my daughter lived in Tampa, we started another secular tradition: Christmas Eve dinner at Carrabas. It's open, and it's lively -- a perfect combination. Sometimes we went to church afterward.

Living in New York City years ago, for the first time I, a Midwestern WASP, felt like an outsider. On Jewish holidays my friends would go to temple or to their parents' homes. How much more left out would I have felt as a Jew -- or a Muslim -- at Christmas?

Oddly, most of us know more about Islam this Christmas than we ever did. I think we were unaware -- I know I was -- of how many of our neighbors are Muslims. One of my daughter's high school friends, whose father is from Pakistan, came home from college at, to us, odd times -- not at Christmas but at Ramadan, a Muslim observance that ended earlier this week. Other than that, I didn't give the religion much thought. And it took a former housekeeper and friend, a Puerto Rican Jehovah's Witness, to tell me they do not celebrate Christmas. She also educated me on the numbers of Hispanic people in Tampa, and across the country, who are Jehovah's Witnesses -- they even have their own convention.

Sept. 11 brought us out of our cocoon. If we were unaware that there were millions of people out there who are of religions other than Christianity, we are no longer.

My husband noted that our first two holiday cards came from a Jew and an Arab.

Christmas is a beautiful season: the lights, the music.

But it is not everyone's season.

Maybe it's my imagination, but this year we seemed to receive a lot more cards with the message, "Peace on Earth."

That is a wish, this year somewhat bittersweet, for everyone.

It won't come true, probably ever. But wish hard tonight; maybe we can move it along.

- Sandra Thompson is a writer living in Tampa. She can be reached at tampa@sptimes.com. City Life appears on Saturday.

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