This Christmas, I’m taking one for the team

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Growing up in Chicago in the ‘60s and ’70s, I distinctly remember that each Christmas Eve the local news would do a segment on a Jewish man who took on an essential job for a day or night so a Christian could take the holiday off. Maybe it was the sewage plant, driving a bus, working a checked baggage cart at O’Hare, or the night watchman shift at Wieboldt’s department store. I don’t remember his name or anything else about him, other than every Dec. 24 and 25 he gave a family the gift of wholeness.

My childhood Jewish family celebrated Christmas, and when that segment came on the news, right before mass from Holy Name Cathedral, one of my siblings would ask if we could maybe work in a 7-11 or staff the tollbooth on the Tri-State, and my dad would remind us: not if we wanted Santa to come, we couldn’t. He didn’t deliver to the tollway.

Our Jewish Christmas was not the result of a mixed marriage, an adoption, or that we were Jews for Jesus (God forbid, my grandmother might interject). It was because back in 1943 or 1944 — after my grandfather moved his family out of the shtetl on Chicago’s West Side to the heavily Catholic suburb of Wilmette — something happened.

On one December day, my mom, then 6 or 7, was given a tiny ornamental Christmas tree as part of a celebration at her public school. That may seem incomprehensible by today’s standards, but keep in mind, as late as the 1970s, I occasionally just walked up and took communion with my friend Brian Kelly at Saturday night vigil — that’s how Catholic Wilmette was.

Anyway, Mom proudly brought her tiny tree home, displayed it in her bedroom, and upon seeing it my grandmother put it under her sensible shoe and smashed it. The shards lodged in Mom’s memory. Fast forward 20-some years and she decided that 2-year-old me — growing up in the very same suburb — was not going to relive her trauma. On Christmas Eve, or maybe it was the 23rd, she got in our VW Beetle with my Uncle Dennis and our Boston terrier Snooky (who ate my crayons and defecated in different hues) and went to buy a tree.

As the legend goes, the garden stores and scout troop lots were all closed or sold out. Yes, it was snowing. And as they drove up and down with no success, suddenly they saw a tree by the side of the road. It had fallen off someone’s car or been discarded because it was so scrawny and pathetic, left to be run over by a Beetle with a 2-year-old inside and neither air bags nor seat belts. Anyway, they stuffed it in the car and took it to our tiny one-bedroom duplex by the Chicago & North Western tracks.

It was a Christmas miracle.

Now at this point you’re probably asking, “What about Hanukkah, you disgusting apostate?” So, Hanukkah and Christmas both celebrate miracles. In one case, there’s a virgin birth of the son of God; in the other, we got some really good life out of a container of lamp oil. The seas did not part, firstborns did not rise to the heavens, and I don’t think the potato pancakes even happened until the invention of the box grater. See, Hanukkah is to Christmas what those late-night Showtime flicks were to a real dirty movie.

From then on, our family tree went up each December and no elder in the extended family would step foot in our house until it came down. We would spend Christmas Eve with the only Christian-adjacent person in the family, my mom’s cousin, who had married a man who was half-gentile and wore red plaid pants and played carols on the piano. That was a bit much, to be honest.

Nothing changed until my mom’s youngest brother Bill married a Christian who was an amazing chef. The family had to get with the program if they wanted to get invited to Christmas dinner at Bill’s house.

I learned after my parents’ divorce that my dad hated the trees and everything Christmas, but my mom wore the pants in our house, so Dad was a good sport about it. He later married two successive gentiles, so he never got away from the yule, except in death.

As for me, I never dated a Jewish girl. It had nothing to do with Christmas, really, but when I married an Episcopalian, it sealed another generation or three of Christmas in my home. Our kids would light the Hanukkah candles and, after eight crazy nights, we’d hoist the tree.

My kids are grown now, but I’ll still go to the farmers market, buy a tree, pray that it drinks, and rue the grotesque colors of the new LED lights. On Christmas Eve, I’ll make Marcus Samuelsson’s Swedish meatballs even though my 23andMe report came back 100% Ashkenazi Jew. If there’s a child at home, we’ll read “’Twas the Night Before Christmas,” and in the morning, I’ll make brunch after gifts. At sunset on the 25th, we’ll light the Hanukkah candles.

But I low-key love Christmas. The consumerism is annoying, but you can’t deny the beauty of the music, the lights, the old movies. I especially like the peace and stillness. I’ve even learned to appreciate mass from St. Peter’s after the local news.

And when it airs, my mind wanders back to my childhood and that sweet man who gave up a night with his loud, overbearing family at a Chinese restaurant to allow an essential worker to be with his. I thought of my 11-year-old self, eager to pilot an L train back and forth through Evanston for hours on Christmas Eve and be interviewed on the Channel 2 News, leaning out the motorman’s window, hand on the door controls.

“Happy to do it,” I’d tell John Drummond, their legendary bulldog reporter. “God expects it of me.” Drummond was old school and would have been impressed that I knew which buses riders could transfer to at Howard Street.

In real life that never happened, but it’s never too late to wrap oneself in holiness. I decided this year was going to be different.

I surmised there might be someone at this newspaper who had to work Christmas Eve composing the annual editorial ode to a holiday about which there’s nothing much new to say. That they might be struggling to find new and compelling ways to convey the essential oneness of humanity, not to mention peace on earth, good will toward [insert pronoun].

Well, there’s no need for writer’s block in 2024. This Jew’s got ya. Take the night off. Take tomorrow too.

I’ll tell my future grandkids I was on the 10 p.m. news, typing away on B-roll, right before the pope came on. And their parents won’t be able to dispute it, because all they pay for is Netflix.

Adam Platt is executive editor of Twin Cities Business.