.41 C 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 .