Welcome to the Buddhist Boot Camp Podcast. Our intention is to awaken, enlighten, enrich, and inspire a simple and uncomplicated life. Discover the benefits of mindful living with your host, Timber Hawkeye.

I remember it like it was yesterday. It was a foggy Saturday morning in San Francisco, December 1st, 1990. My parents and sister were out of the house and I was reading alone at the kitchen table. Around 10 o'clock I noticed the family across the street drive away in their blue jeep. The mom, dad and two daughter team

returned home just a couple of hours later but now they had a dead tree tied to the roof of

their car. Well the tree wasn't exactly dead as in brown without any leaves on it or anything like that.

It was actually very green and lush, but the tree's trunk had been sought off so there was no way to

replant or revive it. Stranger still, the neighbors didn't carry the tree through the side gate to the backyard, where I expected a five-foot tree to go.

They hauled it up the stairs and into the living room.

They had opened the curtains and positioned the tree by the window for everyone to see.

What in the world were they doing?

Mesmerized, I put the book down and watched as they proceeded to wrap the tree with string

lights and crown it with what looked like a Barbie doll at the very top.

Like some perfectly timed prank, our next-door neighbors pulled into their driveway

with an identical tree in the back of their truck,

and then a station wagon drove past our house with a similar tree sticking out the back.

I had never heard about Christmas before because five months prior to this phenomenon,

my family and I immigrated to the United States from Israel, where I was born and raised until my early teens.

It wouldn't be fair to say that I was raised Jewish, however.

My family never kept kosher, which is a longstanding Jewish practice that outlaws the

simultaneous consumption of dairy and meat for example as well as prohibiting

certain seafood dishes, pork, and a few other technicalities, nor did we ever celebrate any of the

Jewish holidays or any holiday for that matter.

We only went to the synagogue once a year

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