Ecumenical

Miss Pink had so much fun over the Christmas holidays that she now wants to celebrate all the winter holidays. I blame Elmo for propagating the "War on Christmas." Bill O'Reilly needs to get over to my house stat. (Um, joking. I think that insistence on the total domination of Christmas is ridiculous. There are much more important things to think about than whether store advertisements say "Happy Holidays." I'm quite sure Jesus is not up nights worrying about whether Christians are pushing his holiday onto everyone else.) Anyway, on with the anecdote.

Miss Pink was watching an Elmo "Happy Holidays" video. It starts off with the Christmas story, then goes on to Hanukkah. They described the origin of the holiday, which went completely over Miss P's head, but she went crazy over the dreidel. She's been singing along to the dreidel song, except she heard the words wrong. Instead of "Dreidel, dreidel, dreidel, I made you out of clay," she's been singing, "Cradle, cradle, cradle, I need you how to play." And she really wants a menorah.

I tried to explain that we don't celebrate Hanukkah. It's a great holiday and all, but it isn't ours.

"Why not?"
"Because we're not Jewish."

This didn't make sense to her. (Of course not; she's barely four. She doesn't know there are different religions.) For the moment, she just wants a dreidel and a menorah and a tree and presents. So I dropped the subject and she's forgotten about it by the time I got around to writing about it.

Of course, this is the child who informed me in early December: "Christmas isn't about Jesus." We worked on that, but you know, it's got to be pretty confusing to a little kid: it's supposed to be about Jesus, but Santa brings you all the good stuff. Except dreidels.

P.S. Sorry those of you who commented had to sign up for Blogger. That is fixed now.