Immigrants' holiday rituals changing.

For new immigrant families, Christmas in the U.S. often became a new holiday--a patchwork quilt of sorts, made of old, altered, and newly invented customs, says Elizabeth Pleck, professor of American history and of human development and family studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She points out that long-lost Christmas customs have been revived and refashioned by newcomers, and even borrowed from other cultures. Consider, for example,: the case of immigrant Jews in America.

As early as 1900. some American rabbis began condoning the celebration of Christmas among Jews, arguing that it was a secular, rather than a sacred, holiday. However, in the 1920s, pressures from the marketplace, the child-centered Jewish culture, and the desire to provide a Jewish alternative to the Christian holiday led to the rediscovery of Hanukkah, the minor Jewish festival commemorating the victory of Jewish patriot Judas Maccabee over the Syrians. Pleck indicates that various "champions of Hannukah remade the festival to be a special holiday for children." For Jews, Christmas in America has been a "battleground that has divided Jews from Christians' and caused a great deal of conflict even among Jews."

Many obscure or moribund Christmas customs were revived in America in the 1960s as part of the new interest in ethnic consciousness. One of them involved Santa Lucia. The festival for the martyred maiden who brought food to fellow Christians in the catacombs and then was murdered and...