Religion Vs. Fun This week we're lighting the Hanukkah candles at our house — most nights, erratically, and with a blessing the children and I are reciting only phonetically. My husband's heritage is Jewish and mine Catholic, but my parents left the church before I was born, and he’s grown away from religious observance (and not just because of his shiksa wife). We’re just not a religious household. As we celebrate Hanukkah this week, and Christmas after that, I’m noticing — again — that what some like to call the “reason for the season” tends to be absent from our celebrations. We light the menorah and eat latkes, and we put up a tree, bake cookies, and welcome Santa Claus, and that’s about it. Complex discussions of our faith or lack thereof seldom come up amid all the celebrations. My children know the history and mythology behind each holiday, and we’ve even talked about the reasons for the timing — we observe Jesus’s birth at this time of year to counter the pagan celebration of the solstice, and we’ve elevated Hanukkah, a relatively minor holiday, to offer an alternative to Christmas for Jewish children. My kids pick up on some of this at school, too, along with a healthy dose of Kwanzaa. But complex discussions of our faith or lack thereof seldom come up amid all the celebrations. I admit I miss Christmas Eve services. But I have felt wildly out of place at many a synagogue (not least the one where I was treated to an entire sermon on the evils of intermarriage) and I don't want to sully the fun of the season with any of that nonsense. How much religion makes it into your holiday?

When to Talk About ‘It’ We can barely get it together to celebrate one holiday in our house, KJ. I'm impressed you can celebrate two! As you know, I’m not in an interfaith marriage. I’m a Jew married to a Jew; our daughters went to Jewish preschool. We light the candles every night; discuss the story and sing some songs; then hide presents for the kids. We try to have non-Jews over as often as possible, because it keeps everybody on their toes; it’s more fun; and it encourages a fresh take on the tradition. That’s one of reason I’m all for interfaith marriages, as contradictory as that may seem. They’re living laboratories of coexistence that model behavior the rest of us are still trying to figure out. It's no wonder 40 percent of Americans are in one. Why do adults squirm when religion is discussed? So to be clear: What troubles me about the holidays is not unique to interfaith families; many single faith families share it as well. It's the idea that since parents are uncomfortable talking about religion, spirituality and God, we leave it out of the holiday all together. Why sully the fun! Sure, maybe the moment of gift giving is not the best time to have these conversations. The kids would likely tune you out anyway. And recounting the sanitized version of Hanukkah or the one about Mary, Joseph and the manger is not what I'm talking about. We had an interesting moment on the first night of Hanukkah. After we talked through the story, I asked, “What role did God play?” The three 7-year-olds all raised their hands to respond; the only person to squirm was my wife. To me, that captures it. Kids are curious, engaged, opinionated; we’re the ones bringing all the baggage. The holidays bring together family, emotion, history, all things vital to exploring the biggest questions in life. That’s exactly the moment to talk about faith. Just because you have a problem with religion (and who doesn't!), why take it out on God? So here's my question: Would it work if you left God out of the gifts but found time to ask your kids what questions they have on the topic at this time of year?

The Reason for the Season Would it work if I just left God out of it altogether? God is so hard. Me, I've made my peace with God, and with organized religion. I can trade e-mails with my adoptive daughter's evangelical former foster parents and accept all of their varying references to religious figures as just another set of words for what I might call "the universe" or "the force of good in the world" (which they undeniably are). My husband has offered an equally relevant take on it. "They say 'God' but they really mean ‘My God, because yours is wrong-wrong-wrong.’" He argues that someone raised closer to the dominant religious tradition in this country (that would be me) just doesn't see all the ways that tradition rolls over everything else. If we look too closely, both the Christmas tree and the menorah will go up in a poof of smoke amid worries about hypocrisy and equal time. Our compromise is to be an "interfaith household" with faith in love, humanity and the unified force of what's good about everyone pushing toward good-in-the-end (and that does take faith). We do talk about how we got there, or at least I do. For complex reasons, I used to spend Christmas (in Texas, where I grew up, it was very much "Christmas" and not "the holidays") wondering if my father would be angry with me if I sang the parts of the songs with Jesus in them. We don't want that kind of confusion. We talk about religion throughout the year, usually at the most inconvenient moments, and that's fine. As for the songs, they’re all a joyful noise. But this time of year, we're enjoying, and in our own way respecting, the traditions our families celebrated from faith in different things. I can't help but feel that if we look at it too closely, both the Christmas tree and the menorah could go up in a poof of smoke amid worries about hypocrisy and equal time. We do what we do because it's what we do, and we do it together, and that's what matters. That willful suspension of either disbelief or belief is something we share with everyone celebrating anything this time of year. Am I wrong in saying there's no real historical agreement on the miracle of Hanukkah? And we all know, as I said before, that Jesus isn't really the "reason for the season." The winter solstice is, and the darkness that closes in so early, and a very human desire that predates this whole discussion to light a candle against it. I'm gathering my little family, and we're lighting lots of candles (and doing what we can to enable others to light theirs). To me, that is "God." No need to belabor the point.