for My Pizza Bagel Family
The earliest memory I have of the December holiday season is lying under my parents’ Christmas tree in our home in upstate New York, staring up at the red twinkling lights. Our whole house would be decked out in Christmas decorations, with Johnny Matthis or Amy Grant’s Christmas album playing loudly on repeat. My mother, an Italian-Catholic from Brooklyn, loved the season with a fervor. Our dining room table would disappear under piles of cookies—some baked by her, some given as gifts—and always, a loaf of panettone that sat untouched but somehow completed the spread.
It might seem like a strange memory for someone who has established herself professionally as a Jewish food writer and expert, but it is my experience nonetheless as the child of an Ashkenazi Jewish father and a Sicilian-American mother. My own journey as a self-described “pizza bagel” has been a winding one. In my early 20s, when I officially converted to Judaism, I gave up Christmas entirely. Part of it was an eagerness to prove my Jewishness to others, and part of it was grief: My mother had passed away when I was young, and celebrating Christmas without her felt unbearable. Rejecting the holiday altogether seemed easier.
But grief and identity are complicated. More than 10 years later, I found myself missing the joy of those childhood Decembers and, more importantly, the connection to my mother they carried. While pregnant with my first daughter nearly 14 years ago, I was hit with a wave of sadness and longing to reconnect with some of those traditions—not in place of my Jewish practice, but alongside it. It began simply: listening to the Ella Fitzgerald Christmas album, then baking cookies to share with co-workers and friends. Over the coming years, I took my daughter to her first Nutcracker performance, and my family and I reinstated the Italian Christmas Eve dinner I had grown up with.
I’m far from the only child of a mixed background trying to navigate multiple identities, especially during the holidays when different family customs must live beside one another. In a state like New Jersey—so wonderfully diverse and populated by many other “pizza bagels” like me—balancing multiple traditions throughout the season is hardly unusual. In fact, I think exposing our families to the richness of diverse traditions, from our own backgrounds and those of others, truly enriches our lives. It helps create individuals and communities that are accepting, embracing, warmer, and more connected.
As the holiday season approaches, we deck our home with wall-to-wall blue, white, and silver decorations. I wait for a particular blue-and-white garland to go on sale every year at Michaels to stock up on more, and hang it with twinkling lights throughout the dining and living rooms. We set nutcrackers on our mantle alongside dreidels, menorahs, and even some very cute—and very kitschy—Hanukkah gnomes. Each year, close friends and I take our kids to see The Nutcracker performed by the New Jersey Ballet, and we also host multiple nights of Hanukkah latkes in our home, paired with brisket or crème fraîche and caviar—my two favorite toppings. Perhaps my favorite tradition of all is dedicating an entire weekend in December to cookie baking. What started as a small gesture for my husband’s office has blossomed into an annual production: dozens upon dozens of cookies packed up for neighbors, teachers, friends, and anyone in our community who could use a little sweetness.
The cookies I choose each year rotate, but it’s always a mix of Jewish, Italian, and American treats. We include sugar cookies—a mix of red-and-green wreaths and blue-and-white dreidels that my kids decorate. Chai snowballs, a recipe I first found on the Whole Foods website over a decade ago, always make the cut. You can’t have a holiday cookie box without peanut butter kiss cookies, of course. Rainbow cookies, with their signature red, white, and green almond cake layers, are a perennial favorite, and I often include some type of chocolaty mandel bread, a close cousin of biscotti.
What’s the difference between mandel bread and biscotti? Writer Marcy Goldman shares in A Treasury of Jewish Holiday Baking that it depends on whether a Nonna or a Bubbe is serving them. Jewish influence on Italian cuisine goes back more than 2,000 years, and more recently Jewish and Italian immigrants in America shaped one another’s food traditions in countless ways. So it’s no surprise that biscotti and mandel bread share a sweet lineage.
In some ways, my holiday cookie boxes are a perfect metaphor for being a “pizza bagel.” They’re not one thing or the other—they’re both. And they’re better for it. There’s no tension between the rainbow cookies and the dreidels, between mandel bread and biscotti. On one plate, they all belong together. Maybe that’s the truest reflection of who I am and the family we’ve built.
The holiday season has always been about light in the darkness—whether it’s a menorah, a Christmas tree, or simply the warmth of food shared together. For me, it’s also about honoring where I come from: my mother’s panettone and my father’s latkes, my own journey of loss and reconnection, and the family traditions I now pass on to my children.
