It’s Christmas season again. Time to republish this essay, newly revised this year. – mj

Each year for Christmas Santa brings me a dilemma: How should I, a follower of the six-pointed star rather than the cross, reply to the endless stream of “Merry Christmas” wishes?

Scenario: It’s December 20 and I’m at my local walk-in hair joint. Today’s stylist tames my graying locks and makes hairstylist chit-chat.

“Have you got big plans for Christmas?” she asks while combing and snipping. The dilemma begins. How do I respond? So many choices between naughty and nice.  My mind races through possibilities:

“Thanks for assuming once again that the entire world marches to the beat of your Little Drummer Boy.” Too naughty, not at all in the spirit of the season.

“Have you got big plans for Chanukah?” Pleasingly Jewish-ist consciousness-raising. Maybe I should put it on a tee-shirt, like that old feminist slogan, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” But too smart-ass when I’m at the mercy of someone wielding scissors.

“I don’t celebrate Christmas.” No way. I’ve tried it before, and it resulted in invitations to attend various nice churches where I’d learn to accept Jesus as my personal savior.

“I’m Jewish,” has never reliably stopped conversation. A Jew, to many Christian citizens I encounter, is known vaguely as a member of a small, not well-understood, weird sect of pre-Christians. Theological questions inevitably follow, such as “Why don’t  Jews believe in Jesus? Why don’t you-all eat ham?”

If we don’t go to theological territory, there’s a danger of well-meant, but misfired attempts at inclusiveness. “My best friend is Jewish,”  “Well, you must be smart,” “My grandmother was Jewish,” “Do you know Barry Levy? He’s Jewish,” “My dentist is Jewish,” “I went to school with somebody Jewish,” “Oh, you’re from New York? Do you know Susan Horowitz? She lives in New York.”

This year, all those possibilities just make me feel weary and estranged. So to the hair sylist’s question, “Have you got big plans for Christmas?” I reply, “Yes I do. Enormous plans. How about you?”

It works! Never mind that my plans are just to have dinner as usual with my wife. I haven’t given a thing away, and she proceeds to tell me all about it:

“I’m having mother over this year for the first time. She can’t cook like she used to.”

“Isn’t that nice of you to take on that responsibility. How many at your table?”

“Sixteen. Don’t you just love Christmas ham?”

“No, I don’t really care for it. I prefer a nice Christmas salmon…”

One small discomfort about my strategy: it occurs to me I don’t have conversational equal opportunity. For instance, come spring I would never presume to ask my hairdresser, “Have you got big plans for Passover? How’s it going with getting rid of your chametz?” (the ritual of cleaning out all leavening from the house, including burning the last crumbs). When you’re a tiny minority of the population, you make majority conversation.

But so what. After all, this is Christmas in America, and my true Christmas gift is that as a Jew I’m free to blend in if I choose to, in a country where Jews were emancipated since the Constitution. Unlike Europe, which began emancipation and citizenship for Jews in 1791 in France, adopted it slowly over the next decades, until the Nazis revoked it in 1935 with the racial Nuremberg Laws, and then attempted to exterminate every last one of us wherever Nazi influence extended.

On this hair care occasion I’m indulging my option of being assumed to be one of the majority, and basking in the glow of what it means.

But inevitably our time together comes to a close. All the hair that needed cutting is lying on the floor or on my smock, and our chit-chat reaches its final dilemma: “Merry Christmas,” she says when I’ve handed back my tipped and signed credit card slip.

“Happy Chanukah,” I think. But I don’t say it.

“Merry Christmas,” I reply, and mean it. And to all my Christian readers, once members of a tiny, weird Jewish breakaway sect, I wish you a Merry Christmas as well, and may G-d grant the world tolerance, peace and prosperity for all in our time.