Light the menorah, trim the tree: Families celebrate as Christmas, Hanukkah coincide

The house was filled with the delicious aroma of frying potatoes and onions as two young girls played with a spinning top on the floor in the living room, below a blue and white banner reading “Happy Hanukkah.”

On a nearby wall, Christmas cards were on display.

One of the girls, Aubrey O’Leary, 11, was teaching her friend Lindsey Giannini, 10, how to play dreidel, spinning the wooden block around and explaining how the markings on each side meant you earned or lost chocolate coins.

Her mother, Robyn O’Leary, was the source of the mouthwatering aromas wafting from the kitchen as she carefully fried up a new batch of latkes: potato and onion pancakes fried in oil and served with either sour cream or applesauce (though some prefer both).

“Your family should fight about two things at the holidays,” Robyn O’Leary said as she flipped a golden brown latke in her skillet with a laugh. “Sour cream or applesauce for the latkes, and who gets to light the menorah.”

The O’Learys, an interfaith family in Los Osos, were in the midst of preparing for their Hanukkah and Christmas celebrations, since the two holidays come together in a semi-rare collision this weekend, with the first night of Hanukkah falling on Christmas Eve.

This year will be the fourth time the first night of the eight-day holiday has fallen on Christmas Eve since 1900.

Christmas and Hanukkah can coincide every few years because of discrepancies between the Gregorian calendar and the Hebrew calendar. Hanukkah, which commemorates the re-dedication of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem during a revolt against the ancient Syrians, starts on the 25th day of Kislev in the Hebrew calendar. This can occur at any date from late November to late December (in 2013, the holiday actually began on Thanksgiving Day, giving rise to the moniker “Thanksgivukkah”).

For the O’Learys that typically means celebrating Hanukkah with Robyn’s side of the family, and Christmas with her husband Brian O’Leary’s side, though sometimes the families will host joint celebrations with both sides.

“We have very inclusive families,” Robyn said. “It’s the idea that we all love each other, and we all get together at this important time. It’s all about family.”

Son Aiden, 13, said keeping track of the holidays can be a bit of a chore, but it’s worth it for the latkes.

“Sometimes Hanukkah comes before Christmas, and sometimes it comes after; it usually gives me a headache trying to keep track of it all,” he said. “My favorite was probably I think two Hanukkahs ago — we were with my cousins and we had a huge Hanukkah feast — because they make good latkes.”

Other local interfaith families celebrate the holidays with a similar setup.

When Lisa Ryan and her husband, Mike Ryan, married, they decided they would raise their family within the Jewish faith (Lisa was from a nondenominational Christian household, while Mike was from a Jewish family).

The family celebrates Hanukkah each year at their San Luis Obispo home — complete with blue Hanukkah-themed holiday lights outside their home — and then travels to Lisa’s mother’s house for Christmas.

“Trying to blend the holidays can be challenging, but both my kids have a very strong Jewish identity, so it’s definitely made it easier to celebrate both,” she said. “It doesn’t make them any less Jewish.”

Their daughters, Allie, 14, and Hannah, 17, said they like celebrating the dual holiday “a lot,” noting that they often get questions from their friends about how it works. They even routinely do presentations or pass out traditional Jewish treats at their schools to help inform other students about Hanukkah, Lisa Ryan said.

“It’s good we’ve always been able to straddle these two worlds,” she said.

Both the Ryan family and the O’Learys said they get one question more than any other when people learn they celebrate both Christmas and Hanukkah: Do you get more presents?

The answer is sometimes, but not often.

“I don’t feel I get more presents,” Aiden said. “People assume that on Hanukkah it’s Christmas every day. You know Christmas, you get a ton of presents? But on Hanukkah you only get one a night. It’s not like, a ton.”

Though presents are the first thing on most people’s minds when they think of the holidays, Robyn O’Leary said it’s important to remember that that isn’t all they are about.

“I grew up in a family where my mom converted, so I did Christmas with my mom’s parents’ house and then I did Hanukkah with my dad’s family, and sometimes we did it all together,” she said. “It was always about getting together with family — and eating. Every good Jewish holiday has food.”

This story was originally published December 24, 2016 at 5:09 PM with the headline "Light the menorah, trim the tree: Families celebrate as Christmas, Hanukkah coincide."