It's the Brian Lear Show.

I'm producer Amina Serna filling in for Brian today.

Good morning again, everyone.

Now we'll talk about family, faith, and the rituals that make a home feel like a home, especially when that home holds more than one tradition.

In a recent New York Times newsletter, Jessica Gross describes a moment she looked around her living room at a Christmas tree, her great-grandmother's menorah from Vienna, National Lampoon's Christmas vacation on the TV,

and yes, a twerking Christmas cat on the mantle.

That was the moment she realized her interfaith family had finally created a holiday world that felt organically theirs.

She writes about the years of worrying whether she'd put her thumb on the scale toward Judaism,

and then the surprising ease that came as her daughters grew older and began making their own choices about what traditions mattered to them.

So today, how do families blend traditions, beliefs, and holidays?

What does it mean to raise children with a combination of actual religious observance and

cherished objects and in jokes that become their own?

And what can we all learn from how kids engage with these rituals?

Jessica Gross is an opinion writer at the New York Times, and she joins us now.

Hi, Jessica. Welcome back to W joins us now. Hi, Jessica, welcome

back to WMIC. Hi, thanks so much for having me back on. You write about a long period of trial

and error with some of these traditions. What were the questions you found yourself wrestling

with in those early years before things finally got settled? my husband and I were not raised super

observant we both went to church and or temple but when neither of us had a faith that we

necessarily felt like we knew exactly how to pass down to our children.

And then it's another layer of difficulty or challenge or thoughtfulness, however you want to put it,

of the fact that we obviously come from different religious traditions.

...