Why Are Holiday Stories Important? Or —what keeps on happening with the promised Hanukkah story.

Holiday Themed Story Writing

The outline for this has been a theme in my life for about three years.

The Holiday themed story, specifically the Hallmark-style Christmas Story has become a writing trope. It probably grew with the advent of cable television as the Hallmark Channel rose to prominence and merged with the Harlequin serial romance novels. I have not made a study of it; but that’s what it felt like as I was in my teens and early twenties.

Hallmark-style Christmas romances. Boy or Girl, usually girl, returns to roots for overdone Christmas glory often with family or mourning it. They meet a person and fall head over heels for them and their excessive Christmas Cheer, changes their entire life to suit that new romance, often abandoning a somewhat present but too ‘city-like’ partner in the city for the whole thing. The next year it’s all dual Christmas Cheer and judgement of those that don’t live or like that lifestyle.

Feels a bit like propaganda to me; ‘city life is unfulfilling, only rural life fulfills you,’ ‘make a massive deal out of Christmas and good things will come to you,’ or ‘Christmas and the obsessive pursuit of it is the only way to live.’

For all the commercialism of American-style Christmas, it appears to eschew or needle it by making corporate greed the enemy of many of the stories, while still raking in millions of dollars to the authors, publishers, actors, producers, etc.

Interesting dichotomy, that.

Why are they popular, then?

They awaken nostalgia in their audience. I am writing this the day after Christmas in a Panera in Ann Arbor having flown across the United States to see my family. For many Americans, the only consistent holiday that families have off from both work and school are the last week of December and the first week of January, and it moves back and forth a bit. That means that generations of families have time to spend together, whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist at roughly the same time without having to negotiate time off of work.

That Christian-centric timing aside, the season itself has things that attract children and adults plan and prepare for them. For example, lights displays at the zoo, ice skating, sleigh rides, playing in the snow, and cookie baking. The time allowed gives adults far more time to spend with their children and their children respond by remembering and treasuring those memories. Indeed, often that time is spent in the evening watching the ubiquitous Christmas Romance Movie together. They’re usually PG or PG 13 and sweet with easy plots- very appropriate for bonding movies that are not another cartoon movie.

They are remembered and associated with good things. Needless to say, both authors and readers love the written genre. Nostalgia, trope-filled romance, and the opportunity for a lot more.

Well, then, why am I interested? I’m openly a Jewish author.

There is not, in the United States, a sizeable parallel genre or genres of stories for non-Christian holidays. It’s hard, given that the majority of the citizens in the US are Christian or Christian-raised, to expect something different.

However, there is a growing Hanukkah-story market of stories of varying representations which personally calls to me as a place to start. While as a holiday it does not have the same religious importance to Jews as Christmas it is the most familiar to the general market for a holiday focused story and happens around the same time, which allows overlap for many of the same tropes.

Ran into each other ice skating does have a certain ring, doesn’t it? It's hard to go ice skating as a friendly activity in the United States in September. Much easier in December.

As a person, I have less positive association with the genre than I do others. It’s hard to have positive associations with a genre when it barely reflects you. However, I enjoy the season in general, and I would like to see it reflect my work. I would also have my writing reflect other faces than just those that are Christian.

Why I’ve failed at writing a holiday story

I have had about thirteen different holiday story outlines over the years. 2023’s was an 8 of 8 set of stories, basically eight stories written anywhere from eight to eight thousand words. I managed to write the introduction of it and a draft of another that I later archived for editing and use later.

Why?

So far, I’ve switched between starting the writing process too late, getting distracted, and finally, the antisemitism of the last year. There are going to be a lot of people who are going to protest that last part. Antisemitism has been rising in the United States since the Trump presidency, and I cannot see that decreasing. In the wake of October 7th and the massacres followed by the war in Gaza, antisemitism has rose even further. I’ve read and heard more hate in the last two months than I care to recount, and I won’t. I did not and do not have the urge to have to do even more blocking and reporting of hate than I already have and do.

I decided to put a pin in my 8 of 8 project, work on processing my grief, fury, and fear, and come back to the project later.

Why do I know that I will write a Hanukkah Story in the future?

It is the end of December, which means that I am currently starting to work on my writing plan and editing plan for 2024. I will be putting out a rough schedule, creating checkpoints, and getting more and more pieces into place.

It will happen.

How do I know it will?

I do not feel that I have processed anything. I feel as if the trauma is recurrent and rolling forward. I am going to try and write that holiday story in 2024 and see if it processes anything. Cute, kitschy, holiday hallmark romance? Maybe. But it will also have the grief and the fury and the fear and it will have hope. Because hope is what happens. We survived October 7th. We will survive, as a people. That is hope.