My mother has two life mottos:
“Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke,” and “Any excuse for a party.”
These two serve her pretty well, and our family has adopted them for basically any situation.
People tend to look at me funny when I tell them that the latter was the main theory behind my religious upbringing.
My mother was raised half-Catholic, half-Jewish. She was confirmed in the Church and has a rosary her favorite priest gave her. But she also went to synagogue with her father, used to read Hebrew, and uses Yiddish in the way a lot of New Yorkers do. Her mother’s family nearly disowned my grandmother for marrying a Jew; my mother’s mother wept because my father had waist-length braids. (It turns out Grandma’s family was actually Jewish as well, but that’s a story for another time.)
My dad was raised pure Catholic, went to school with nuns and the Marianist brothers, his Spanish-Cuban and Irish sides mingling comfortably in the church if nowhere else.
I’ve never asked my parents if they had a particular plan for our religious upbringing. It was obviously important to my mom that we retain a link to our Jewish heritage–to the family that fled the pogroms and the people that were lost in the camps–but as far as I know they never worked out a formal agreement.
In fact, our religious upbringing was extremely haphazard. We were baptized for our grandmothers’ sakes, but that was pretty much the end of it. I never went to CCD or Hebrew school. I never took my First Communion or got confirmed; I never had a bat mitzvah, either. We were told that we were both Catholic and Jewish, and that both were equally important, but not what that really meant.
To me, as a kid, the major tenets of these religions were the holidays. Not the Ten Commandments or the Nicene Creed, but the festal days. My parents never talked about God. My dad is, as far as I can tell, a total atheist. My mom blends elements of both with all sorts of other superstitions, the Hail Mary and praying to St. Anthony just as important as knocking on wood and warding off the evil eye. She says she believes in cosmic debris rather than a bearded old man on a celestial throne.
So my religious upbringing came a few times a year, a few days at a time, with pageantry and presents. Christmas meant going to the children’s mass at St. Brigid’s, crammed in an overstuffed church full of wriggling kids too excited about Santa and reindeer to pay much attention to the miracle of the Christ child and the virgin birth. Easter meant a mass with baby animals, petting bunnies and lambs and once a baby llama out on the lawn in front of the church, the miracle of the resurrection obscured by the excitement of chocolate eggs and a new dress.
Chanukah meant latkes and playing dreidel with the children of Mom’s best friend from childhood, gambling for pennies and discussing whether a Chanukah bush was an adequate substitute for a Christmas tree. Passover meant a seder with two other families, kids my age and older half-siblings and Uncle Hy and Great-Aunt Ruth coming up to visit from the city, half a dozen of us running around to try and find the afikomen and singing songs about the Four Children to the tune of “Darling Clementine”.
Any excuse for a party.
Most of what I actually know about religion has been cobbled together from popular culture, from Jesus Christ Superstar and the Prince of Egypt and the bit in History of the World, Part I where Mel Brooks as Moses drops one of the tablets of the “Fifteen – Ten Commandments!” I didn’t learn what transubstantiation was until high school, when I was taking AP European History and we got to the Protestant reformation. I read the Anne of Green Gables series never understanding what a Presbyterian or a Methodist was. I had no idea the Narnia books were a Christian allegory until an embarrassingly advanced age. But I never got past Prince Caspian, either.
I tried, as I got older, to get to grips with what this all meant. I attended Sunday services at a friend’s church to sing for Advent and Lent and Easter, and listened to the stories and tried to figure out how to believe in this all. I attended services for the High Holidays for the first time in college. The first year, I found some of my friends and sat down in their row, and they gawked at me. “We didn’t know you were Jewish,” they said. I didn’t really know if I was either. I visited churches and synagogues when I went for my trip abroad, searching for something.
While I found many interesting things, many beautiful things in these services, I never felt anything beyond that. There was a connection to my family and the roots of the family tree stretching back through the centuries. There was appreciation for the beauty of the music, the art, the architecture. But nothing more. I wonder sometimes: if I’d been raised in a faith, in either faith, in both with more time given, would I feel something? Would I hear that voice within myself, a voice from something greater than myself?
Maybe. For now, though, I’m content to keep celebrating the holidays in my own way. To get really excited for Thanksgivukkah, to see my Spanish relatives at Easter and come home for the big seder whenever I can manage the time off. To have Christmas parties with my friends and eat all the Reese’s peanut butter eggs I can manage.
And I’m going to make my mother a sampler that says “any excuse for a party”.
Tags: all religion stories will be illustrated with simpsons screencaps, christianity, interfaith families, judaism, naomi vega, religion
LOVE.
Funny thing about your religious experience and mine– my version of Christianity is like a half Jewish sort where we keep Sabbath, Kosher, and the High Holy days (not Christmas/Easter), but also accept Christ as the redeemer and sacrifice to cover our sins. In some ways it’s like the practice of Judiasm with the belief of Christianity.
So maybe I kind of sort of understand where you’re coming from??? But in a very very different way?
Love the article (:
Also I would like to say that I love The Toast a lot for creating an online space where I feel comfortable discussing this sort of thing with others without being afraid of a negative reaction!! THANKS THE TOAST <3
Hebrew Christianity? I went to a Hebrew Christian church for several years as a kid, and that’s what it was like. I loved that church; the people were so nice and we had these awesome seders in hotel ballrooms.
You could call it that! But I’ve never heard that term before, haha
Wow, I’ve always wanted to find a church like that! How did you come upon that? Did you have a Jewish background?
(I’ve found most other Christians, if they weren’t raised Jewish, tense up and give you funny looks, if you mention an interest in seders, or the Jewish roots of….gosh EVERYTHING in Christianity. :-P)
We actually don’t do seders, but there are some Jewish roots. Our services are very protestant feeling though. If you’re interested, you can go to my tumblr ask page http://fannybrawne.tumblr.com/ask and leave me a message and I’ll link you to my churches website!
If you don’t have a tumblr then I can give you my email address!
Oh wow, that sounds exactly like my religious upbringing. To the point where my first reaction was “hey, I wonder if we know each other!” I’m no longer in the church, but I still travel every year to spend part of the Feast of Tabernacles with my family, and feel a little guilty about working on the Sabbath and loving Christmas.
Sounds like we just might know each other then!! The internet is a crazy thing 😮
Yay!! This is so good. I had a similarly mixed/nothing upbringing, with parents coming from all sides and it all distilling into a “we’ll do our best to answer your questions, but whatever you choose to do with your life is fine by us.” But we did Christmas, and Holi, and I did Passover/Hanukkah with all my Jewish friends, because parties.
best knuckle tat ever.
I regret to note that it’s only eyeliner, but I encourage everybody to draw it on or get it tattooed for their next Toast meetup.
I have no Jewish blood that I know of, and certainly no Jewish upbringing, but I was having a conversation with my dad about A Serious Man a while ago and he commented that a lot of the church-related elements really resonated with him as a former Catholic who got hit by nuns in school.
“singing songs about the Four Children to the tune of ‘Darling Clementine’.”
MY FAMILY DOES THIS TOO! I also grew up in a mixed faith household (Jewish and Methodist), though my father’s general apathy towards religion means I was essentially raised Jewish. People are always super surprised to find out either that I’m Jewish (“Oh, but you don’t look Jewish at all!”) or that I’m not *entirely* Jewish (“Oh, but your name is so Jewish!”), which I find really odd.
Fascinating reading about your experiences, which were fairly different from my own!
Just wanted to say thanks for this story–I was ready to comment and request on the Gabbin About God series for non-christian religion stories, since I’m sure there are many readers that come from other faiths. Reading about christianity is interesting, but I would love to learn about other religions, too!
“Gabbing” is a Christian-specific series, since it’s meant to draw on Mallory’s multitudinous knowledge of Christian theology, but if anyone wants to volunteer to answer my semi-ignorant yet genuine questions about their own religion, they should email me!
Glad I’m not the only one who didn’t get the Narnia-Christianity connection until an embarrassingly advanced age!
In other news, your mom’s philosophies sound fantastic.
I didn’t get that connection for a long time either, despite my family being very very Christian when I was growing up! But we always tended not to look very hard for deeper meaning in our novels (when we were allowed to read them).
Me either–I still remember when I found out, because it felt like someone had punched me in the face and stolen something precious. (Growing up a semi-Jew in rural America created a lot of aggressively anti-Christian feelings in my early adult life, before I discovered that it’s not Christianity that makes people assholes. [It’s being an asshole that does it.]).
You’re lucky. My dad specifically is so into those books as metaphors for Christianity, that now I am not a Christian anymore, I can’t bring myself to read them for pleasure even.
Which is a bummer, because they used to be some of my favorites.
My spouse and I aren’t religious, but our parents are, so G is theoretically being raised Catholic and Greek Orthodox. The only thing this really means is that because the churches are on different calendars, she gets to celebrate Easter twice every year.
One day she says to me, “So there are two Easters?”
“For you, yes. One date for each church.”
“But only one Christmas?”
“Yes, you little hustler. Only one Christmas.”
I was just in a meeting yesterday with some Russians who told me it was Orthodox Christmas! Don’t tell G.
ORTHODOX! Yes. My Mom was raised Romanian Orthodox, and always calls it “American Easter”, and my Dad is like, “no no no one is Orthodox Easter, and then other one is the one ALL OTHER Christian denominations celebrate.”
XD ahahaha yes. But Christmas does last longer…
I am now INCREDIBLY disappointed that the church I went to growing up never had a baby llama to pet for Easter. Or baby bunnies. Or baby animals at all.
There were human babies, but I find human babies to generally be disappointing until the age where they will sit and listen to me read stories.
I don’t want to jack up the comment count on my own piece too flagrantly, but thank you all for your lovely comments, you’re all wonderful and invited to my next seder. <3
I loved this! I have a similar background – Catholic mother, Jewish father – and I was raised with basically no religion. I like to tell people I’m a Cashew (Catholic-Jew, get it?) but really I’m just an atheist, which is much more boring. I’ve never really felt a connection to either religion, although in my dad’s case, being Jewish has always been more of a cultural thing than a religious thing, so I do find the traditions and phrases and jokes from his side of the family interesting.
I can’t tell you how much I resent being raised Southern Baptist. The only thing good I took away from that was I already knew all the stories and names of most of the artwork for my art history classes. Feh.
My mom pretty much never expresses religious tendencies in any way, so I can never put my finger on what she believes (if she believes at all), and my dad does a lot of things that make it very clear he has a faith and was raised within a system with structures (Lutheran, raised in Finland where they’re not quite the same as US-style Lutherans, though I’ll be damned if I can explain that myself. He’s very adamant it’s not the same, though), but neither of them did much about teaching me or my siblings a faith. We all came to religion (or lack thereof) ourselves. But we’re really good at Christmas, for whatever reason. It’s always been a family thing for me, not a faith-based one. Which sometimes makes people look at me funny. I’ve pretty much just settled on “apathetic agnosticism” as my descriptor of choice.
In any case, I’m loving all the writing about faiths of different kinds on the Toasts, because my own lack of religion has manifested as a HUGE INTEREST in reading about other religions and their practices and beliefs, even if I don’t ascribe to any one over another. This was so much fun to read. I hope we have more like this!
This is not much related to anything, but I went to Riverside Church in NYC for a while, and they are affiliated with two different Protestant denominations, specifically so that people can do what they want wrt baptism — they will do infant or adult baptism and confirmation and whatever else gets em in the door. I liked it!
So interesting to hear people talking about this, and how many people have had experiences akin to mine! My mom’s side is Jewish and my Dad’s side is Catholic, but neither of them is religious, so it was parties and holidays but no church-going or temple-attending. I did have a bat mitzvah, though, by my own choice, and it started me on the path to becoming an enthusiastic, spiritual, non-denominational Nice Jewish Girl ™. However, there was a lot of doubt and experimentation and lack of confidence in my being “Jewish enough” to overcome on the way. It was a confused way to grow up, and I felt a lot of spiritual needs that I had no way to express and no outlet for. So now I’m a hippy-dippy liberal, which extends to my Judaism (Jewish Renewal for the WIN!!), and my family is really weirded out by how religious I became when I was raised in a pretty atheist home. C’est la vie. All my Cashews up in here, I feel you!
I agree – similar background here, except my dad is the Jewish one. We grew up without formal religion after the ‘bris & baptize’ phase was over, and are all hippy-dippy liberals now (some more than others… hello, Wiccan family members, how ya doing?)
It’s a strange way to grow up, but it’s the crucible from which I arose, so it’s sometimes hard to remember that it’s strange.
COSMIC DEBRIS. <3 to your mom, and to you. Sounds like a great and fun way to grow up.
The only difference between that story and mine is that my Mom is all Jewish instead of half. Her favourite holiday is Christmas, but because of the beauty of her decorations. Any excuse for a party should be their doormat. 🙂
I was frustrated reading this, because being raised similarly, I was like,”hey! This lady totally has the answer the yawning chasm of spiritual emptiness I feel because of my background!” Which of course was not the case (and not your fault. Lovely article. Thank you for sharing it with us.) and that’s fine. But I’ve gotta speak up here.
Cashew? We CANT be cashews. Catholic + Jewish =/= Cashew. It doesn’t add up. There’s no “sh.” Maybe if we married someone who practiced Shintoism or was a Shaker. I feel sad and nameless.