Chrismukkah is a pop-culture neologism referring to the merging of the holidays of Christianity's Christmas and Judaism's Hanukkah as celebrated in interfaith households where one parent may be of Christian heritage and another parent of Jewish heritage. The word itself is a portmanteau arisen through the blending of the words "Christmas" and "Hanukkah". Chrismukkah is also celebrated as an ironic, alternative holiday, much like the Seinfeld-derived "Festivus." USA Today has described it as "[t]he newest faux holiday that companies are using to make a buck this season".[1]
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A Christmas celebration with a tree, songs, and gifts became a symbol of being a part of German culture for many middle-class Jewish families in the 19th century. Some Jews celebrated Christmas as a secular "festival of the world around us" without religious meaning, or they transferred Christmas customs to the Hanukkah festival.
Chrismukkah was popularized by the FOX television program The O.C.. On the show, the character Seth Cohen has a Jewish father and a Protestant mother. As a way to merge the two faiths, Seth claims to have "created Chrismukkah" when he was six years old. The series included annual Chrismukkah episodes for every season of its run. Particulars of when exactly the holiday was celebrated were not given; Seth simply said in the first season's Chrismukkah episode that it was "eight days of presents, followed by one day of many presents," with a stress on the word "many" (this was repeated in the second season's Chrismukkah episode by Seth's new brother Ryan, with an added "many"). The only references to how it was celebrated, other than the family displaying both a Christmas tree and a Hanukkah menorah, was that the Cohens spent Christmas Day itself rather than going out for Chinese food and a movie as many American Jews have taken up in recent years, watching movies like It's a Wonderful Life and Fiddler on the Roof at home while eating Chinese takeout. Chrismukkah later received mention in the television series, Grey's Anatomy.
In 2004, Chrismukkah.com was launched by Ron and Michelle Gompertz, a Jewish-Christian intermarried couple in Bozeman, Montana. Their website took the fictional O.C. Chrismukkah and brought it into reality, selling humorous Chrismukkah greeting cards and dispensing detailed mythology about the fictional holiday. The Chrismukkah.com Web site was widely credited with popularizing Chrismukkah to a non-television watching audience.
Chrismukkah.com stirred up controversy in the Fall of 2004 when the New York Catholic League issued a national press release opposing Chrismukkah. Further, The Catholic League and the New York Board of Rabbis, in a joint statement, condemned Chrismukkah as "insulting" to Jews and Christians.[1]
In December 2004, Chrismukkah was listed in Time magazine as one of the buzzwords of the year.[2] It was also reported in a Scottish newspaper, that Chrismukkah had been added to the authoritative "Chambers" dictionary.[3] In 2005, Chrismukkah.com founder Ron Gompertz authored a humorous book of Chrismukkah recipes called Chrismukkah! The Merry Mish-Mash Holiday Cookbook. Gompertz's follow-up book, entitled Chrismukkah - Everything You Need to Know to Celebrate the Hybrid Holiday (published by Stewart, Tabori and Chang) was released in October 2006. A rival book by Gersh Kuntzman, Chrismukkah: The Official Guide to the World's Best-Loved Holiday (Sasquatch Press), came out at around the same time.
A similarly named holiday called Christmanukkah was featured in The Strangerhood. Unlike Chrismukkah, Christmanukkah is twenty days long (twelve days of Christmas and another eight for Hanukkah), and all of the days are spent receiving gifts and eating until passing out. Pants and pumpkin cider are considered a traditional gift.
Similar neologisms such as Chrismahanukwanzakah[4][5] and HanuKwanzMas[6] blend Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa.