Hanukkah ended the evening of December 5.
It is the Festival of Lights in commemoration of the miraculous burning of the oil dry Temple lamp for eight days until fresh oil was secured. It is a sacred story coming out of the Jerusalem Temple rededication during the time of the Maccabees around 164 B.C.E..
Christmas is December 25th.
It’s the commemoration of the birth of Jesus, only we know it is unlikely to have been his actual date of birth. The first Christmas had more to do with providing a Christian alternative to European pagan festivals than with the actual date of Jesus’ birth.
That’s okay with me. Just as Hanukkah is a story Jews tell about Jewish resilience and the Temple rededication, so Christmas is the story Christians tell about the birth of the One we call Lord. The specifics of the stories add to their power, but don’t determine their value.
That’s because history matters little when it comes to telling religious stories unless, of course, your faith depends on every word of the story being absolutely and infallibly accurate historically.
Mine doesn’t.
For me faith is grounded in the power of story, a specific story, in fact, that gives me identity, that tells me who I am, that offers me an explanation of the purpose of life that is more than the sum of its parts.
So I celebrate Christmas not because it’s when Jesus was born, but because it offers me and so many others a way to tell his story.
That’s important because as a person of the Christian tradition the story of my life is intertwined with the story of his life. I cannot imagine it any other way. It’s who I have been all my life.
I am sure Jews feel the same way about their story. Their identity is inextricably bound to the story of a people, just as my Christian identity is inextricably bound to the story of a person called Jesus.
Hanukkah is one way Jews celebrate their story. Christmas is one way Christians celebrate ours.
The stories and the identities they birth need not be in competition, or conflict, as if one being true means the other is false.
Both are true because each tells the world that God is real, that light does shine in darkness, that hope is not in vain when everything says it is, that faith is not about being the only story that is true, but about being a story that tells the only truth that matters – that unconditional love really is the greatest gift of all.
