'Who asked YOU?'

According to Wikipedia, Chrismukkah is the modern-day merging of Christmas and Hanukka as celebrated in interfaith or in a household of two Jewish parents where one may not be religious at all and has a desire to put up a Christmas tree while the other is very religious causing the two events “to cancel each other out into one blur of a gift giving holiday.”

An exhibit at the Jewish Museum of Berlin called “Chrismukkah: Stories of Christmas and Hanukkah,” sourced the origin of the word to German-Jews in the late 1800s who called the holiday "Weihnukkah." (Weihnachten is the German word for Christmas.)

The Fox Televison program The O.C., which features the Cohens, an interfaith family, is credited with introducing the concept in a 2003 holiday episode titled “The Best Chrismukkah.”

Since then, each holiday season features a show will a similar theme, including, “The Chrismukkah Show” (2004); “The Chrismukkah Bar Mitz-vahkkah” (2005); and the most recent, “The Chrismukk-huh?,” which aired Dec. 14.

In December, 2004 Chrismukkah was listed in Time Magazine as one of the “buzzwords of the year.”

Which seems sort of ironic since observant Jews have always considered Hanukka as a celebration of fighting against assimilation.

# posted by Ron Kaplan : Thursday, December 14, 2006