For Chicago’s interfaith families, Christmas and Hanukkah are a chance to explore new traditions

Peter Kujawinski is pleased with the twist he’s given to his family’s “super-cheesy Christmas family pajama” tradition this year.

“I haven’t told anyone yet,” he said. “But I ordered Hanukkah pajamas because you have to take advantage of (Hanukkah) being on the same day.”

For Peter, 50, who was raised Roman Catholic, and his wife, Nancy Kujawinski, who was raised in a Reform Jewish family, Hanukkah, which begins on Christmas Day, brings their two sets of already intertwined traditions into even closer proximity.

The Lincoln Square couple and their three children are one of a growing number of American families who belong to more than one religion. The increase in intermarriage is especially pronounced among American Jews: A Pew Research study several years ago found that about 42% of American Jews were married to people who are not Jewish—and among Jews who had married since 2010, 61% of those marriages were to people of other faiths.

The holidays can present difficult choices for these families, said Samira Mehta, a scholar of interfaith family life at the University of Colorado at Boulder. But, she said, most people in interfaith marriages enter into their partnerships with mutual respect for each other’s traditions. Ideally, that respect shows in how a family chooses to celebrate holidays in December and the rest of the year.

“I really don’t think it matters what any individual interfaith family decides to do,” she said. “I think it’s important that they make the decision in a way that’s respectful.”

The Kujawinskis have decided on an all-inclusive approach to their holiday, starting with the traditional Polish fish dinner and Oplatki, traditional Christmas waffles, on Christmas Eve. They will end Christmas Day by lighting the first candle in their menorah. Nancy, 47, considered a batch of latkes and assumed “I’m not going to burn them and smoke out of the kitchen.”

“We think of trying to maneuver between two religions as something that’s difficult or something that’s going to be a challenge, and there is some of that,” Peter said.

But, he continued, combining and creating traditions also brings a lot of joy.

The chaplains: Integrating family traditions and anchoring their sense of self

Andrew Kaplan faced a steep learning curve when he first attended Mass with his future wife’s family. Andrew, 32, didn’t know the proper etiquette for someone who wouldn’t take communion and had to think quickly as congregants began lining up for wafers and sipping wine.

“I kind of laid down on the bench and let people walk by because I didn’t know where to go,” he said. “I think Natalia was horrified. I just had no idea.”

Most of the Kaplans’ efforts to integrate their Roman Catholic and Reform Jewish backgrounds have gone much more smoothly than that Mass, which they laughingly described as “Seinfeld-esque.”

Married by both a minister and a rabbi, they commute from Deerfield to a couples dialogue group at the Family School, a bi-faith school that focuses on interfaith families. They are raising their son with both sets of holidays, both kinds of traditional foods, and religious instruction from both of their backgrounds.

This year they will celebrate Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with Natalia’s family for dinner, caroling and mass. On Wednesday, “we were thinking about maybe bringing a menorah and having everyone participate,” she said.

Natalia, 32, said that if she had married another Catholic person, faith might not have had such an important role in her life.

“The fact that I married Andy (meant) I’ve had to put so much more effort and intention behind my religious practice and tradition,” she said. “You have a person asking you, what does it mean, why are you doing it?”

“There’s a lot more introspection,” Andrew said. “I think being in an interfaith relationship has strengthened my relationship with Judaism.”

The Weinsteins: Shared ethics across faiths

Lainey Weinstein and her family are celebrating Christmas and Hanukkah in many of the typical ways: They will spend Wednesday with Weinstein’s mother, who raised her Catholic, and make sure they attend a Joffrey Ballet performance of “The Nutcracker.” They’ve held a Hanukkah party every year for more than a decade, even though most of the attendees aren’t Jewish themselves, and a Catholic family friend oversees the latke making.

The family also volunteers on Christmas morning in St. James Food Pantry in the Douglas neighborhood, along with families from both Kenwood Synagogue KAM Isaiah Israel, where Weinstein, 54, serves on the board, and Old St. Mary’s School on the Near South Side, where her daughters attended elementary school.

This tradition, Weinstein said, “is really rooted in both religions when it comes to service and repairing the world.”

Weinstein and her family are more focused on finding common morality and ethics in their religious life than theology.

“I don’t know if God is really running this,” she said. “I find community in both faiths. My family finds community in both faiths.”

Steve Hunter and family: A Jewish home with a Christian living in it

Steve Hunter’s house is “a Jewish home with a Christian living in it.”

Hunter, 62, is a Presbyterian who sings in the choir at Lincoln Park Presbyterian Church. He also keeps kosher at home. On the Jewish holidays, he fasts and attends services with his wife, a Conservative Jew, and 23-year-old daughter Sarah Hunter, who also identifies as Jewish.

Despite religion being a “huge” discussion for him and his wife when they were dating and thinking about marriage, Steve Hunter said: “It never occurred to me that she would have a problem with a Christmas tree.”

Steve, on the other hand, had grown up in a house where “every square inch was decorated and my mom had the Mormon Tabernacle Choir blasting the Hallelujah Choir.”

So the arrival of a Christmas tree was the result of a compromise, he said. They put Hanukkah candles on it.

The family also exchange gifts for both holidays, despite Steve’s frustration with how Christmas has “turned into this giant marketing campaign.”

“Our decorations are definitely a bit different to your average Christmas decoration,” said Sarah. But, she said, the approach is working for them.

“I feel like we’ve found a way to still (celebrate) my Jewish values, but my dad can also express his faith,” she said.

Despite historical skepticism in American Jewry about intermarriage, the idea that an intermarried family like the Hunters can lead a robust Jewish life is gaining wider acceptance. Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, the premier seminary for Reform Jewish clergy, announced in June that it would accept and ordain students who were intermarried, recognizing that “many Jewish individuals with non-Jewish partners … are deeply engaged in Jewish community life and peoplehood.”

And the attitude that a tradition like a Christmas tree cuts into a family’s faith identity is also changing, Mehta said: “As one rabbi put it to me, it would be a really anemic Jewish life threatened by three weeks flashing light.”

Lynnette Li and John Rappaport: Following their children

Lynnette Li describes her decision to marry outside of evangelical Christianity as “probably my biggest act of defiance.”

Li, 44, and her husband, John Rappaport, a University of Chicago Law School professor who is Jewish, met in high school and were best friends, but “originally the idea of ​​becoming a couple was off the table because of the way we were. traveled.”

Vacations with extended family have brought some tension in the past, she said. They hold their holiday parties for their nuclear family “so we don’t have to feel the pressure or the expectations of others.”

They try to answer their children’s questions about their dual identities as they come up and be open to the many religious possibilities that come with their background.

“We’ve told them ‘Yes, you’re Jewish, you’re Chinese, your mother’s family is evangelical Christians,'” she said. “Whatever you want to explore, we will support your exploration of it.”

Their children’s interests have guided their holiday traditions. They didn’t have a Christmas tree for the first few years of their children’s lives, until the family came across one on a street in Hyde Park.

“I’ll never forget the feeling of their eyes getting really big and that big gasp,” Li said. “It came out of their awe.”

They make latkes and Nutella donuts and bless the menorah for Hanukkah, and they go for Chinese food and movies on Christmas itself. Li’s 12-year-old daughter recently started Hebrew school after thinking that “Jews know how to see through a bad thing to what can be hopeful about it.” (Li’s response: “I was like, ‘Who are you? Why are you so smart?'”)

On a recent late afternoon in December, Li sat around a table with about a dozen others for a workshop at KAM Isaiah Israel titled “Is My Home Still Jewish If I Have a Christmas Tree?”

The workshop was run by 18Doors, a Jewish organization focused on interfaith families. Many participants said it was important to keep Hanukkah, a relatively minor Jewish holiday, along with Christmas to ensure their children felt special and connected to their culture at a festive time. Others said the holiday was an important way to celebrate light during the darkest time of the year. Others spoke of the holiday as an opportunity to share Jewish culture and celebration with people outside the religion, whether Christian or of another faith.

They marveled at a selection from the Talmud, or Jewish scholarly commentary on the Torah, and discussed Adam’s first alarm at the growing darkness and his reflection: “Woe is me, perhaps because I have sinned, the world grows dark around me.”

Towards the end of the workshop, Lesley Roth extended her hand. She wanted to know how to train children to talk to young relatives who were expecting a visit from Santa Claus. Judaism does not have people living at the North Pole, she said. A wave of concern rippled across the table.

Andy Kirschner, the workshop facilitator, invoked his own wife and her explanation of Santa Claus to their children: They should think of Santa Claus as the embodiment of a mitzvahor act of kindness.

“Santa Claus is an idea that we teach young children who need to learn about giving,” he said. “We give them Santa Claus so they understand how to receive them. And when they’re old enough to know how to do it on their own, they don’t need Santa anymore.”

The room breathed a collective sigh of relief.