LOOK AT IT this way," my mother used to say. "You get presents eight times, and they get them only once."
But even she wasn't quite persuaded. One of the rare old home movies I have of my parents during the few years they were married to each other depicts a Kodak-perfect 1950s Christmas morning -- complete with glittering tree, red-and-green stockings and that most Protestant of gifts, a Lionel train.
Hanukkah is a tough sell in America.
Though we did light the candles eight nights each year -- pyromania being another selling point to children in my family -- the Jews' Festival of Lights always seemed low-wattage next to the tree at Rockefeller Center, even as seen in black-and-white via the "Today" show.
True, Hanukkah is an inspiring tale of Jewish persistence, but anyone can see it's no Passover. My mother, who mocked Mother's Day as a fraud perpetrated by the greeting-card industry, eventually came to dismiss Hanukkah, too, as a commercial scam -- a minor holiday inflated by assimilated American Jews to compete with the majority culture around them.
If she were right, that effort is particularly lame this year. The Jewish calendar has rendered Hanukkah missing in action: already more than halfway gone, it's an afterthought to Thanksgiving rather than an alternative to the big Yuletide show. Jews who are still coping with turkey and brisket leftovers may not be up for dreidel spinning. Nor, perhaps, are they eager for another elaborate family gathering at which certain in-laws might reopen hostilities brought to an uneasy cease fire only last Thursday.
Even the New York Jewish weekly The Forward ran a Hanukkah-eve article in which the writer, Ilene Rosenzweig, guiltlessly confessed to celebrating Christmas -- as an expression of American identity "unencumbered by Jewish burdens of history and common sense."
I don't feel guilty about my own recurrent Christmas pangs, either, though I'm less certain of what they're about. When my mother finally gave up on Christmas trees -- the last being a little white plastic model perched forlornly on the piano in the 1960s -- I thought I had as well. But this week, as Hanukkah made its early entrance, Christmas grabbed me once again.
When this happens, my first reflex is to go shopping in a department store -- surely the most Jewish of Christmas rituals -- or take in a Christmas movie. The remake of "Miracle on 34th Street" -- a Christmas movie set in a department store -- might have satisfied both cravings, but how can there be any "Miracle" without either Macy's or Gimbel's? So I opted for Disney's "The Santa Clause" instead.
I wasn't alone; no movie had more customers last weekend. And ecumenically enough, "The Santa Clause" welcomes all Christmas celebrants, regardless of creed, by avoiding all mentions of church, Jesus, Mary, Bethlehem or even mistletoe. So minimal is its Christmas content that Republicans might well recruit its authors to write their one-size-fits-all school prayer.
The film got to me anyway. But why? Not because of the Jewish music on the soundtrack (Irving Berlin's "White Christmas"). Or because of its garish Santa's workshop, so reminiscent of the old Burdines where my grandparents took me toy shopping in Miami Beach.
Instead, I realized I was attracted to exactly what first drew me to the original "Miracle on 34th Street": In both movies, a child believes that his scattered, broken family will somehow be reunited by a messianic Santa who descends from above.
Could it be that the enduring spirit of Christmas in America has less to do with any religious sentiment than with the nonsectarian proliferation of divorce since World War II? Do more American children ask Santa for a parental truce than for bikes or Barbie dolls? If you take that wish away, the only season's greeting in "The Santa Clause" is a particularly chilly faith in consumerism. Among the brand names plugged in this Disney movie are the Disney Channel and that least Christian of fast-food chains, Denny's.
Does a Jew have the right to ask if this is what Christmas is coming to? Probably not. But if the answer is yes, there just may be a prayer for Hanukkah yet.
A5 Frank Rich is a columnist for the New York Times.