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11.11.II
oil
May the coming year be filled
with health, happiness and prosperity
for all our family and friends.
Rick and Patti Phillips
Lester J. Morris Hillel
Michigan State University
May the coming year be filled with
health and happiness for all our family and friends.
L'Shanah Tovah!
The Slaims
Cheryl, John, Jennifer, Eric & Anne
May the coming year be filled with
health and happiness for all our family and friends.
L'Shanah Tovah!
Jodi and Kevin Neff
Adam, Alli, Emily and Zack
We wish our family & friends a very
healthy, happy and sweet New Year.
— Jeffrey & Karen Kraft —
Aimee, Elissa, Rachel
100 Setpember 21 • 2006
JN
k-.1
IN
Creating Your Own
Family Traditions
Ann Arbor
0
ne of the biggest
struggles that
a person faces
in an interfaith marriage
is the thought of not con-
necting with his spouse
or kids who have different
religions. Holidays exacer-
bate this issue.
Celebrating your wife's
customs can be fun and
enlightening, but it can also feel
foreign and uncomfortable at times.
You don't feel as close to the tradition
because it's not yours — you have no
history with it.
Being a Protestant dad helping to
raise two girls in Judaism (my wife's
religion), I know I felt that way prior
to our marriage. What I found, how-
ever, was that it didn't take long before
we started to develop our own tradi-
tions. As the years pass, these tradi-
tions turn into new loving memories
that belong to just the four of us.
When Bonnie and I were first mar-
ried, the tradition was already set by
whatever my wife and her family had
done in the past. It often meant hop-
ping on a 747 and flying to Boston to
celebrate Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur
or Passover with her parents and
cousins.
Helping my wife observe her Jewish
holidays was new to me, but I started
to grow accustomed to it. I enjoyed
being with her family, and I eventually
got over having to miss the Michigan-
Notre Dame football game during the
High Holidays.
In a way, I guess you could say that
that was the start of our own tradi-
tion — making flight reservations
and missing intense gridiron rival-
ries. : From the day we were married,
we knew that the ways we. observed
holidays would change. This was evi-
dent as we tried to figure out which
holiday decorations to put up in our
tiny apartment during the month of
December.
When our children were born,
traditions were turned upside down.
For the High Holidays-, Bonnie's par-
ents began flying to Ann Arbor to be
with us. At our synagogue, we started
attending the kids' or "folk" services
for the holidays. Nothing
against the adult services,
but I found these to be easi-
er to understand anyway.
During Chanukah, we
started to experience what
it was like to do more than
light the menorah and sing
"Maot Tzur" off key. As par-
ents, we were now in charge
of creating the magic for our
children.
It's an incredible sight,
watching your kids' eyes light up with
the glow of the candlelight. To top
it all off, we began hosting our own
annual Chanukah party, where we
invite my Protestant parents and sib-
lings over for latkes and high-stakes
dreidel games. (When I say "high
stakes:' I of course mean tasty Jelly
Bellies.)
Once we had children, Bonnie
introduced me to a holiday I never
knew existed — Purim. It has become
a yearly tradition for us all to put on
costumes, go to the megillah reading
at temple and eat hamantashen at the
carnival afterward.
Then there's Shabbat. Although
observing the Sabbath is a tradition
from my wife's upbringing, our fam-
ily has added its own twists. The girls
take great pride in determining who
gets to drink the last gulp of juice
from the Kiddush cup and who gets to
wear which yarmulke (the pink one,
the Michigan block M one, etc.).
Without even realizing it, our ver-
sion of Friday night is one of the many
ways in which we've created our own
family traditions and sweet memories.
When you have a family of your own,
it comes naturally.
Wondering whether I'll connect to
my wife and daughters is no longer
an issue. It hasn't been for a long, long
time. E
Jim Keen is author of the book "Inside
Intermarriage: A Christian Partner's
Perspective on Raising a Jewish Family"
(URJ Press, forthcoming) and a con-
tributor to the book "The Guide to
the Jewish Interfaith Family Life: an
lnterfaithFamily.com Handbook" (Jewish
Lights Publishing). He is a columnist for
lnterfaithFamily.com . His e-mail address is
jckeen@umich.edu .