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When I was a kid, we got to celebrate both Hanukkah and Christmas. My mother was Jewish and my father Episcopal. My grandmother, my father's mother, would come over Christmas day with shopping bags full of presents for me and my sisters. It was a wonderful thing, until I started to grow up. She never figured out what to give a teenage boy. I wonder now if she had had the same problem with my father.

When our kids were little we loved seeing them open the presents, although really the best thing about Christmas for me as an adult was decorating the tree. I wanted to put every ornament on the tree, even the ones that my wife had made in Middle School, long before we met. It was all about the process, getting the ornaments out of their boxes, deciding where to put them, putting some ugly ones on the back side because they deserved their place too, putting the fragile ones high up where the cats couldn't reach them, and so on. Now, the kids are grown, we have no grandchildren, and the holiday is more about relaxing with family. It's not just the nine days, but the whole holiday season, starting in the middle of November and ending in January.