In 2020, celebrating the Jewish festival of Purim was one of the last fun things we did BCE (before the Covid era). My son dressed up as Iron Man, I recycled my skeleton costume from Halloween and our Rabbi dressed up as a case of Corona beer in a light-hearted nod to the virus that, as we now know, ended up being no laughing matter.
In late February this year however, Purim slid by us quietly, like a penguin on ice, despite life having returned to some form of comparative normalcy after the best part of a year in and out of lockdowns.
But it wasn’t that I forgot. It was the equivalent of walking down the street and seeing someone you know, but you don’t want to talk to. So you put your head down, perhaps even press a dead phone to your ear, pretend you haven’t seen them and just keep on walking.
My family unit has multiple cultural threads woven through it. Though not even remotely religious, my husband celebrated all the Pagan/Christian festivals growing up, in a suitably secular fashion, including Easter and Christmas.
Being a proud Birpai man, my husband also celebrates or commemorates several important days of cultural or political significance, including Invasion Day and Naidoc Week, to name a few.
In my family we celebrated all the major Jewish festivals, including Jewish New Year, Yom Kippur, Purim, Sukkot, Chanukah and Passover, punctuated with regular Friday night Shabbat dinners. There were also other days that were culturally and historically important to us, like Holocaust Memorial Day.
Growing up in Hong Kong with our chosen Chinese family, we celebrated several Chinese festivals each year, but at the very least Chinese New Year has continued to be an important date on our family calendar.
I’m also obsessed with Halloween, as are the kids. And I believe everyone deserves to feel like a superstar on their birthday, so I make a pretty big deal out of those too.
This year I knew Purim – a festival that commemorates yet another round of Jews ensuring their own survival and is celebrated with dress-ups and hamantaschen cookies stuffed with jam or poppy seeds – was coming. I knew it was almost here. I knew it was upon us. But I just didn’t have it in me.
I found myself at the bakery a few days before, and seeing the hamantaschen in the window half-heartedly asked them to throw in a bag – but they misheard me and threw in one singular cookie. I found the sad little specimen when I got home, but didn’t even have the energy to trek back to rectify the error. My babies shared it, one half each. A pretty good indication of my lack of commitment to Purim this year.
So as it finally slid right on by us and I could see it in the rear-view mirror of the month, the parental guilt kicked in. What the kids don’t know won’t hurt ‘em, right? But then I started wondering, how am I going to manage this for the next 20 years?
All up we have a minimum of 21 major days of cultural significance in our house. 21. That’s close to one a fortnight. If you include the additional days we celebrate with friends who are diverse in their own cultural backgrounds (we’ve celebrated Diwali and Carnivale among others) it would definitely reach one a fortnight.
Here is the question for which I don’t actually have an answer: when you’re a multicultural family with so much history and tradition to preserve, how do you figure out where to draw the line?
My inclination is that it should be up to the kids where the line is drawn, but not all festivals are fun and involve jam doughnuts (Chanukah), presents (Christmas) or going to the annual fete at the Collingwood children’s farm with our Blak friends and family (Naidoc).
Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, is about spending a day being introspective and reflecting how you have treated people around you through the year, and perhaps how you can be the best version of yourself. It might not be as fun as hunting for chocolate eggs like we did this weekend, but it’s important, culturally and to encourage my kids to grow up thinking about their own behaviour. Invasion Day is a story of genocide, murder and resistance and no matter their age, kids need to know about the history of the land on which they live and in our case, the land for which they remain sovereign custodians.
Perhaps it’s festival FOMO, but every single day is important and choosing between them seems impossible. So we won’t.
I think it’s acceptable to develop your own customs and in doing so, figure out what is most important to you and what resonates with you and the rest of your family.
For us, Easter has become about spending the day with a special and dear friend who’s become a member of our chosen family, at her shack near the beach in Rosebud. This year we were joined for our Easter egg hunt in her back yard by two other mutual and dear friends, who’ve also become part of our mishpucha (extended family). We don’t do a big meal or go to church. Ask the kids and they’ll say it’s about eating their own bodyweight in chocolate, but in time they’ll see that’s not the only enjoyable thing about it for us. It’s about leaving Melbourne for the day and seeing people we love.
Not every festival has to be prescriptive and they can be tailored up or down in terms of how much energy you give them and how much prominence you give them in the family calendar.
Ultimately, we’ll continue to celebrate every aspect of our diversity and commemorate the good days and the not-so-good days. But if this tired mumma lets one slide on by, that’s alright too.
There’s always next year.
