“I think Christmas has become almost a secular type of holiday more than Hanukkah, which really does have more of a religious feel,” he said during a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter. (He used Kwanzaa as another example of a holiday that, like Hanukkah, would be “hard” to create a movie around because of its “religious point of view.” The pan-African celebration, unlike Christmas, is a secular holiday.)

Hallmark is falling into the same trap as my small-town government all those years ago: Instead of helping to make non-Jewish Americans more comfortable with Jewish traditions — which is what true inclusion looks like — they are trying to make Christmas more comfortable for Jews.

And that is missing the point. For most of us, to grow up Jewish in the United States means to learn to navigate a world in which we’re constantly reminded of our difference.

Part of this process has long involved finding our way through the frenzied Christmas season. Don’t get me wrong: Christmastime is beautiful. It’s hard not to enjoy walking through the decked-out streets of New York in December, when the city is bathed in color and music and the smell of an impending snowfall. For many Jews and non-Jews alike, the aesthetics are often delightful.

But for some who don’t celebrate, the most wonderful time of the year can feel like a never-ending deluge, in every store, on every channel and at every turn, for more than a month, year after year. Worried that our children would feel left out, years ago many Jews began giving gifts for Hanukkah, which is celebrated around the same time as Christmas; and just like that, a relatively minor Jewish holiday became the most famous of them all.

While Hallmark’s attempts to include us are appreciated, the way in which they’ve done so, like my town’s “holiday tree,” is unnecessary and counterproductive. In fact, in an increasingly anti-Semitic world, I worry that these things end up causing more harm than good — because whenever something quintessentially Christmas is replaced, reduced or renamed, it fuels the fire of those who believe in the meaningless War on Christmas and seems to worsen people’s view of those of us the change was meant to “help” in the first place.

Instead of homogenizing — interrupting a traditional Christmas movie lineup, or changing the names of trees and parades — we should be focusing on the less-overt and more-meaningful ways we can celebrate our differences and promote understanding. Around the holidays, that could be as simple as setting aside a moment to have a family discussion about the different holidays people celebrate, why they’re important and why it’s essential that we are allowed to celebrate different holidays in the first place.