What I Learned From Playing Santa

Great quantities of food were already piling up potluck-style along a row of tables outside the classroom when we arrived. Pots of maklouba with green parsley glinting against the turmeric yellow rice, and platters of finger-thin stuffed grape leaves. Bowls of pasta in tomato sauce, tabbouleh, Greek salad, hummus and tahini. Piles of white cheese slices, burekas and fresh pita. And of course an abundance of sweet baked goods. Chocolate cake (one with sprinkles, one without sprinkles), baklava, rugalach, knafe and chocolate chip cookies.

How could the kids concentrate on the upcoming holiday performance with this feast awaiting them?

But soon the teachers were calling upon us to find seats.

Well-practiced after a year and a half together in kindergarten, the children took their places in a square-shaped u. We parents perched on the child-sized chairs in rows in the audience, adjusting our adult bodies as best we could.

The classroom walls were as abundantly festive as the food table, covered with brightly colored pictures of Menorahs and candles; Christmas trees and reindeer; spluttering latkes and crispy sufganiyot smiling googly-eyed; a red-cheeked Santa, with his rolling belly and eyes squinting from above his perpetually big beaming smile. In the back of the room a knee-high Christmas tree perched alongside a menorah with its arms reaching skywards.

As I looked around I noticed something else: I was adjusting.

A year prior, when my oldest started at pre-kindergarten, and we were first time parents at the joint Jewish-Arab school in Jerusalem where we had decided to send him, the first joint holiday party we attended had been a bit of a jolt to the system.

Growing up as a Jew in the diaspora meant, at least for me and many I know, absorbing sensitivities and fears about assimilation, as well as the dark history of anti-Semitism and persecution against Jews. While in the place and era I grew up - Berkeley in the 1980s - I never experienced or even worried about anti-Semitism, this inherited history still meant that Christian symbols in public spaces could sometimes trigger complicated mixed emotions.

On the one hand, ideologically my husband and I had been drawn to the idea of sending our kids to a joint school where Jewish and Arab children, both Muslim and Christian, attend. They’d grow up together, learning each other’s languages, holidays, histories. No small feat in the Israeli-Palestinian context.

But still. There were moments - such as when observing our respective holidays and commemorations with their various symbols - when a particular expression or practice of this inter-culturalism might hit on a point of sensitivity. For me this often triggered a fierce rapid-fire internal debate, which forced me to examine the instinctive reaction and test it against a given belief, idea or value.

The teachers finally got everyone quiet and the kids began their show.

“Laili-tai, laili-tai…” the children trilled, as they pranced around with little candles in a carefully choreographed dance of Jingle Bells in Arabic. Then they shifted into the Hebrew Hanukah song Banu choshech l’garesh - we have come to expel the darkness. And so they continued throughout, switching back and forth smoothly between songs, holidays and languages.

They closed with lighting the Hanukah candles, which the teachers had asked Eliot, my husband, to lead. He approached the menorah, placing a kippah on his head as he did, lit the candles, and recited the Hebrew prayers.

“Amen,” everyone responded, and the room erupted noisily into applause and then the chaos of everyone getting up to start the eating festivity. I began making my way through gossiping parents and racing children to say hello to a few people and then toward the food spread.

But I hadn’t gotten far when Eliot grabbed my arm. “Listen, they’re going to ask you to be Santa Claus,” he said, “and you have to say yes!”

What was he talking about?

“They asked me to do it, but I felt it would be way too confusing to the kids if I were to dress up as Santa Claus right after I lit the Hanukkah candles. So I told them to ask you.”

I was taken aback. Why me? Didn’t they want someone big, tall, male and… mmm…. well… Christian??

But by now my son’s teacher Sabrin - who herself was Muslim and had recently, following a struggle with serious illness, begun to wear the hijab - had made her way through the crowd to me.

“Rebecca, we need you to be Santa Claus?” she said breathlessly. “Please!”

I laughed and protested, but she brushed aside everything I said.

“The father who was supposed to be Santa is stuck in traffic,” she said, “we need your help!”

Could I really say no to this direct plea? Sabrin clearly felt she could turn to me and I didn’t want to disappoint her.

It was true that in America I might have felt I should decline something like this. Christmas had so much that appealed, that it was hard not to wonder if that might not be a step on a slippery slope diluting or confusing Jewish identity.

But I was living in Israel. Our risks here were not about losing Jewish identity nor from anti-Semitism, but about pushing against what I feared were incipient trends of growing intolerance in Israeli society. Dressing up as Santa Claus wasn’t going to dilute our children’s Jewish identity; it could only help convey a message that other religions, whether Christianity or Islam, are not inherently threatening.

“Ok,” I told Sabrin. “I’ll do it.”

She threw her arms around me, and then thrust a big bag into my hands. “Here, this is the costume,” she said, hurrying me into the empty classroom next door. “Change here and when you come in to the room you’ll hand out the toys from this bag.” She pushed a second bag into my arms and rushed back to the party’s chaos.

I donned the red and white suit as quickly as possible, arranging the huge extra folds of material which hung around me as best I could and struggling to get the plastic gold buckle through the holes of the big black belt that was the only way I could keep the pants from falling down. The big white beard scratched against my chin, its synthetic plastic smell filling my nose and head.

At last I emerged from my improvised changing room and threw open the classroom door with a dramatic gesture: “Ho, ho, ho little children! Meee-rrrr-y Christmas,” I bellowed, holding my belly as I threw my head back and laughed.

“Ahhhh!” the children squealed, racing towards me, eyes popping and open-mouthed.

“Ho, ho, ho!” I kept crying out as I walked around, distributing the toys in the bag until everyone had received one. The children were beside themselves with delight. Parents beamed.

When it was all done I changed back into my regular clothing and re-emerged.

“Mabruk!” Sabrin congratulated me.

The kids looked confused. They had no idea that it had been me inside that costume! They kept looking at us skeptically, unwilling to believe it until finally I burst into a series of hearty “ho, ho, hos”. Their eyes popped out again and then they erupted into laughter at the unexpected transformation and affirmation that what they’d thought impossible was actually possible.

Indeed, I never would have imagined that one day I’d play Santa. But in fact, after all of my heated internal debate, it felt just fine.

That was more than a decade ago. When my kids were little. When Israelis and Palestinians were definitely not in a good place, but, from today’s vantage point, it’s hard not to long for the problems we were then dealing with.

But the lesson I took from that shared holiday party and stepping in to play Santa so long ago still holds true. Religion has been used to excuse terrible inhumanity – just as religion has also inspired our greatest acts of humanity. In such very dark times, opportunities to appreciate each other’s holidays can also serve as opportunities to acknowledge each other’s shared humanity.

May this year’s overlapping Christmas and Hanukah holidays hold aloft a little light to help us keep going.