Tomorrow is the first night of Hanukah. It also happens to be the first year my kids are old enough to understand the concept of holidays. So I’m really looking forward to the beautiful moment when I tell them, for the first time, the story behind the Jewish festival of lights – the thrilling tale of how, 2,500 years ago, a small group of Jews called the Maccabees recaptured their temple from the Syrians and the oil inside that was supposed to last for one day burned instead for eight whole days – and they reply with that time-honoured question: “Uh-huh, so how many days until Christmas?”

The Jews are a people of suffering; pretty much all our holidays are based on this: “Now it’s time to celebrate / Grab a drink and fix a plate / But before you feel too great/ Remember that we suffered – hey!” as Patti LuPone memorably sang on the unsurpassably brilliant Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. This is just one of the many reasons it’s hard to convince Jewish children to get excited about, say, Passover, a spring holiday commemorating the tears of enslaved ancestors, instead of the Other Spring Holiday, which involves multicoloured eggs and chocolate: “Hey kids, I know the Christians are offering you bunnies and jelly beans, but check out my Passover Seder plate – I got horseradish and a lamb’s bone for you!” Bigging up Jewish holidays basically turns you into that weird neighbour who at Halloween tries to convince local kids to come trick or treating at her house by promising travel-sized toothpastes and old fruit.

And this isn’t just about the accoutrements: Christian holidays tend to sound better, full stop. As Jon Stewart once said when talking about what he calls the annual “faith/off”, what we’re dealing with in December is one holiday celebrating the birth of the Christian messiah, and another “celebrating oil lasting longer than it would normally last. There’s no contest there!” My favourite Friends episode nailed this dichotomy even more succinctly by literalising the metaphor, in The One With The Holiday Armadillo. Ross attempts to get his son, Ben, excited about Hanukah by – for reasons we don’t need to investigate too deeply now – dressing up as an armadillo, only for Ben to ditch him as soon as Chandler walks into the apartment dressed as Father Christmas. This, essentially, is what Hanukah v Christmas is: an armadillo v Santa Claus.

Like Ross Geller and Jon Stewart, I am a Jew who has had children with a non-Jew, and the pain suffered by Jewish parents like us is particular and poignant. But despite Ross and Stewart’s warnings, I did not anticipate this until my children were born. I was raised as Reform as a Reform Jew can get: yes, I went to Hebrew school, but my mother was a firm believer that any holiday that was fun was a holiday to be celebrated. We grew up doing Hanukah and Christmas, Passover and Easter, sometimes simultaneously. So when I had kids I assumed this kind of free-for-all approach to the Christian and Jewish holidays – bisecular, if you will – was natural and complication-free. As the holiday armadillo warned me almost two decades ago, I was wrong.

What I hadn’t taken into account was that I’d grown up in a home in which both parents were – despite my mother’s fondness for Christmas stockings – Jewish. This meant that the Jewish holidays had the two-pronged support that they need to hold their own against Santa Claus and the Easter bunny. Stewart was recently in London on a standup tour and he returned to this issue, describing how in his home – as in mine – his non-Jewish spouse is more than happy for him to teach their kids about Jewish holidays – but that it’s hard to convince your kids to care when their other parent is opening advent calendars at the other end of the kitchen. Given that my kids are, as I write this, downstairs picking out advent calendars with their father, I don’t think I have ever related to a standup set so hard in my life.

A Jew who marries out of their religion is a Jew who – it is safe to say – takes a fairly relaxed view of religious strictures. Indeed, you might even have convinced yourself that you think religion is largely a load of unkosher baloney. You’re gonna marry who you want – in your face, Rabbi! But there is something about having children that sharpens the mind. Traditions that used to make you groan with their hokiness suddenly seem weirdly important when you realise, first, they aren’t just about religion but are a connection to your childhood and, second, if you don’t shove them down your kids’ throats, no one else will. The survival of the Jewish faith is all on your shoulders! Kinda!

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But Judaism is famously resilient and has seen off worse foes than the ubiquity of a commercialised Christmas. So tomorrow night, all advent calendars and Christmas tree ornaments will be temporarily banned from the kitchen, and I will light the candles and regale my children with the story of how once upon a time a pot of oil burned for longer than some people expected. And then I will bribe them to pretend to care with a load of chocolate dreidels. You’re good, Santa – but I got moves, too.