Peter Kujawinski is pleased with the twist he’s given his family’s “super-cheesy Christmas family pajama” tradition this year. “I haven’t told anybody this yet,” he said. “But I ordered Hanukkah pajamas because you have to take advantage of (Hanukkah) being on the same day.” For Peter, 50, who was raised Roman Catholic, and his wife, Nancy Kujawinski, who was raised in a Reform Jewish family, Hanukkah beginning on Christmas Day brings their two sets of already-intertwined traditions into even closer proximity.  The Lincoln Square couple and their three children are one of a growing number of American families who belong to more than one religion. The rise in intermarriage is particularly pronounced among American Jews: A Pew Research survey from several years ago found that about 42% of U.S. Jews were married to people who are not Jewish — and among Jewish people who had gotten married since 2010, 61% of those marriages were to people of other faiths.  The holidays can present tricky choices for these families, said Samira Mehta, a scholar of interfaith family life at the University of Colorado at Boulder. But, she said, most people in interfaith marriages enter their partnerships with mutual respect for each other’s traditions. Ideally, that respect shows in how a family chooses to celebrate holidays in December and throughout the rest of the year. “I really don’t think it matters what any individual interfaith family decides to do,” she said. “I think it matters that they make the decision in a way that is respectful.” The Kujawinskis have settled on an all-inclusive approach to their holidays, beginning with the traditional Polish fish dinner and Oplatki, traditional Christmas wafers, on Christmas Eve. They will finish Christmas Day by lighting the first candle of their menorah. Nancy, 47, was contemplating a batch of latkes, assuming “I don’t burn them and smoke out the kitchen.”  “We think of trying to maneuver between two religions as something that is difficult or something that is going to be a challenge, and there is some of that,” Peter said.  But, he continued, combining and creating traditions also brings a lot of joy.  Nicky Margolis, Kris Ray and Nancy Kujawinski spend time together during a holiday block party on Dec. 14, 2024. (Addison Annis/for the Chicago Tribune) The Kaplans: Integrating family traditions and anchoring their sense of self  Andrew Kaplan faced a steep learning curve when he first attended Mass with his future wife’s family. Andrew, 32, didn’t know what the correct etiquette was for someone who wouldn’t take communion and had to think fast as congregants began to line up for wafers and sips of wine.  “I just kind of laid on the bench and let people walk by because I didn’t know where to go,” he said. “I think Natalia was mortified. I just had no idea.” Most of the Kaplans’ efforts to integrate their Roman Catholic and Reform Jewish backgrounds have gone much more smoothly than that Mass, which they laughingly described as “Seinfeld-esque.”  They were married by both a priest and a rabbi and commute in from Deerfield for a couples’ dialogue group at the Family School, a dual-religion school that focuses on interfaith families. They are raising their son with both sets of holidays, both kinds of traditional foods and religious education from both of their backgrounds. This year, they’ll celebrate Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with Natalia’s family for dinner, caroling and Mass. On Wednesday, “we were thinking of maybe bringing a menorah and having everyone participate,” she said. Natalia, 32, said that had she married another Catholic person, faith might not have held such an important role in her life. “The fact that I married Andy (meant that) I’ve had to put so much more effort and intention behind my religious practices and tradition,” she said. “You have a person that’s asking you what does this mean, why are you doing this?” “There’s much more introspection,” Andrew said. “I do think being in an interfaith relationship has strengthened my relationship to Judaism.” The Weinsteins: Shared ethics across faiths  Lainey Weinstein and her family celebrate Christmas and Hanukkah in many of the typical ways: They will spend Wednesday with Weinstein’s mom, who raised her Catholic, and make sure they get to a Joffrey Ballet performance of “The Nutcracker.” They’ve thrown a Hanukkah party every year for more than a decade, though most of the attendees aren’t themselves Jewish and a Catholic family friend supervises the latke-making. The family also volunteers on Christmas morning at the St. James Food Pantry in the Douglas neighborhood alongside families from both the Kenwood synagogue KAM Isaiah Israel, where Weinstein, 54, sits on the board, and Old St. Mary’s School on the Near South Side, where her daughters went to elementary school. That tradition, Weinstein said, “is really rooted in both religions when it comes to service and repairing the world.”  Weinstein and her family are focused more on finding shared morals and ethics in their religious lives than theology. “I don’t know if God really drives this,” she said. “I find community in both faiths. My family finds community in both faiths.” Steve Hunter and Family: A Jewish home with a Christian living in it  Steve Hunter’s house is “a Jewish home with a Christian living in it.”  Hunter, 62, is a Presbyterian who sings in the choir at Lincoln Park Presbyterian Church. He also keeps kosher at home. On the Jewish High Holidays, he fasts and attends services with his wife, a Conservative Jew, and 23-year-old daughter Sarah Hunter, who also identifies as Jewish.  Despite religion being a “huge” discussion for him and his wife when they were dating and thinking about marriage, Steve Hunter said “It never occurred to me that she’d have a problem with a Christmas tree.” Steve, on the other hand, had grown up in a house where “every square inch was decorated and my mom had the Mormon Tabernacle Choir blasting the Hallelujah chorus.”  So the arrival of a Christmas tree was the result of some compromise, he said. They put Hanukkah lights on it.  The family also exchanges gifts for both holidays, despite Steve’s frustration with how Christmas has “turned into this giant marketing campaign.”  “Our decorations are definitely a little bit different from your average Christmas decorations,” Sarah said. But, she said, the approach works for them. “I feel we’ve found a way to still (celebrate) my Jewish values, but my dad can express his faith as well,” she said. Despite historical skepticism in American Judaism around intermarriage, the idea that an intermarried family like the Hunters can live a robust Jewish life is gaining broader acceptance. Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, the premier seminary for Reform Jewish clergy, announced in June that it would accept and ordain students who were intermarried, acknowledging that “many Jewish individuals with non-Jewish partners … are deeply engaged with Jewish communal life and peoplehood.” And the attitude that a tradition like a Christmas tree cuts into a family’s faith identity is also changing, Mehta said: “As one rabbi put it to me, it would be a really anemic Jewish life that was threatened by three weeks of twinkly lights.” Lynnette Li and John Rappaport: Following their children Lynnette Li describes her decision to marry outside of Evangelical Christianity as “probably my biggest act of defiance.”  Li, 44, and her husband, John Rappaport, a University of Chicago Law School professor who’s Jewish, met in high school and were best friends, but “originally the idea of becoming a couple was completely off the table because of the way we were raised.” Holidays with extended family have brought some tension in the past, she said. They keep their holiday celebrations to their nuclear family “so that we don’t have to feel the pressure or of other people’s expectations.” They try to answer their kids’ questions about their dual identities as they come up and be open to the many religious possibilities that come with their background. “We’ve told them ‘Yes, you are Jewish, you are Chinese, your mom’s family are evangelical Christians,’” she said. “Whatever you want to explore, we will support your exploration of it.”  Their children’s interests have guided their holiday traditions. They didn’t have a Christmas tree for the first few years of their kids’ lives until the family encountered one on a Hyde Park street.  “I will never forget the feeling of their eyes getting really big and that huge gasp,” Li said. “It came out of their awe.” They do latkes and Nutella doughnuts and blessings over the menorah for Hanukkah, and they go for Chinese food and movies on Christmas itself. Li’s 12-year-old daughter recently started Hebrew school after opining that “Jewish people know how to see through a bad thing to what might be hopeful about it.” (Li’s response: “I was like, ‘Who are you? Why are you so wise?’”) Lynette Li chats during an exercise at a workshop for mixed-faith Jewish families about navigating different traditions during holiday celebrations at KAM Isaiah Israel Congregation on Dec. 13, 2024. (E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune) On a recent late afternoon in December, Li sat around a table with about a dozen others for a workshop at KAM Isaiah Israel titled “Is My Home Still Jewish If I Have a Christmas Tree?”  The workshop was run by 18Doors, a Jewish organization focused on interfaith families. Many participants said it was important to observe Hanukkah, a relatively minor Jewish holiday, alongside Christmas to ensure their children felt special and connected to their culture at a festive time. Others said the holiday was an important way of celebrating light at the darkest time of year. Others talked about how the holiday was an opportunity to share Jewish culture and celebration with people outside the religion, whether they were Christian or of any other faith.   They puzzled over a selection from Talmud, or Jewish scholarly commentary on the Torah, discussing Adam’s initial alarm at the growing darkness and his reflection: “Woe is me, perhaps because I sinned the world is becoming dark around me.”     Toward the end of the workshop, Lesley Roth raised her hand. She wanted to know how to coach children on talking to young relatives who were expecting a visit from Santa Claus. Judaism doesn’t have people who live at the North Pole, she said. A current of worry rippled across the table.  Andy Kirschner, the workshop facilitator, invoked his own wife and her explanation of Santa to their children: They should think of Santa as the embodiment of a mitzvah, or act of goodness. “Santa is an idea that we teach young children who need to learn about giving,” he said. “We give them Santa so they understand how to receive. And when they’re old enough to know how to do that on their own, they don’t need Santa anymore.” The room breathed a collective sigh of relief.