Here is a piece I wrote and never had the chutzpah to submit anywhere. If you are a regular Girl in a Party Hat reader, you might know some of the details already, so apologies in advance. Also, there are no pictures from last Christmas; I looked. But here is a photo taken the day we had tea with Grandma.

I’ve always found it amusing that so many Jewish singers – Neil Diamond, Barry Manilow, Barbra Streisand – make Christmas albums. But I get it. Because I am a Jew who loves Christmas.

I have loved Christmas for as long as I can remember. When I was a kid, my  mom bought my sister and me blue and white stockings, which she stuffed with treats like sugar free gum. It just wasn’t the same. As an adult, I baked Christmas cookies, sang carols and gave gifts, but it wasn’t until I met my future husband Ray that I stopped going to the movies and out for Chinese on Christmas Day. Finally, I was allowed into the inner circle.

Ray’s family and I don’t have much in common, but we all love Christmas. Over the years I settled in, reveling in foreign treats like Irish soda bread and angel food cake soaked in red Jell-o. My mother in law made me my own stocking, and hung it above the fireplace next to her own kids’ stockings from childhood. When my father in law’s velvet smoking jacket – worn just once a year, on Christmas Day – fell apart from old age, I scoured eBay for a replacement. And when Ray and I had kids, I ordered stockings embroidered with “Grandma” and “Grandpa”.

My mother in law created lots of family traditions. The Sunday after Thanksgiving is reserved for tree decorating. There’s a driving tour of neighborhood holiday lights. And on Christmas Day, we’re expected over early in the day, for presents and soda bread, and must stay til long after dark, digesting turkey and all the fixings.

Last year, my mother in law tried to cancel Christmas. She’d been diagnosed with lung cancer earlier in the year, and the week after Thanksgiving, we learned it had spread to her brain. She was hopeful about the future, but saving her strength. She’d been shopping for gifts for months, but she didn’t have the energy, she announced, for Christmas Day the way we’d always had it.

We all insisted that the show must go on – if only for the kids, though I know that I, for one, wanted it just as much – and Ray stayed up til 3 on Christmas morning, making his mother’s stuffing. His father downsized to a turkey breast. I made an extra big batch of her favorite iced sugar cookies. It was a good Christmas. I shopped with extra care for gifts; for her big present, the girls and I took my mother in law for tea at the Ritz, a few days before Valentine’s Day.

That’s the last time the girls saw their grandma, beautiful in her carefully styled wig, her face puffy with steroids, dancing with them (albeit slowly) to show tunes on the grand piano in the fancy hotel lobby. 

We’re all a little lost without her, and now, suddenly, it’s Christmas. I’m a mess, trying to keep up her traditions. It took me a long time to figure out that you don’t actually need to mail the letters to Santa. You just need to hide them, and write letters back. But how do I get them postmarked “North Pole”? I don’t know where to find the shiny black coal that my mother in law always gave the girls to put in their grandpa’s stocking.

And what about my father in law? I knew we were in trouble when I overheard him at a family party this summer, trying to offer his Christmas tree to my mother, who had to remind him that she’s Jewish.

A couple weeks before Thanksgiving, I emailed him.

Hey, I really hate to bring up a sensitive topic, I wrote, but I’m wondering what you want to do about Christmas? How about Ray and the girls and I come over the Sunday after Thanksgiving and we all put up your tree? I’ll bring egg nog.

After a lot of consideration, my father in law had a different idea. OK, he replied, he’ll put up the tree. But how about on Christmas Eve, instead? And yes, he wants us to come over on Christmas, but not til 5, and he wants to have Kentucky Fried Chicken.

I think that sounds perfect, I told him. Maybe we can start a new tradition.