Why Chrismukkah is "the greatest super holiday known to mankind"

In 2003, when "The Sopranos" was having a gap year and shows like "Six Feet Under," "The Wire" and "The Shield" defined our perception of quality TV, a Fox teen drama that debuted in August introduced "the greatest super holiday known to mankind": Chrismukkah. It's a portmanteau that rolls off the tongue with the sweetness of a kosher marshmallow.

Twenty years later, Chrismukkah, which "The O.C." gifted us in the first season episode "The Best Chrismukkah Ever," is a part of the pop culture lexicon, regardless of whether you know its origin story. Ultimately, we know that we're talking about blending Hanukkah with Christmas.

If a holiday episode is only as memorable as its details, then the durable appeal of Chrismukkah can be explained in "The O.C." character Seth Cohen’s episode opening pitch. "So what's it gonna be, huh? You want your menorah? Or a candy cane? Hmm? Christmas or Hanukkah?" he asks. "Don't worry about it! Because in this house, you don't have to choose."

From there, Seth raves about the new holiday that is sweeping the nation, or "at least the living room."

"I showed that scene to my kids this year, in part because I did the book," author Alan Sepinwall told Salon, a reference to his latest release, "Welcome to the O.C." "And they came out of it like, 'Can we just do Chrismukkah? That sounds awesome.'"

Credit "Dexter" writer Lauren Gussis, who started as a production assistant on the show, for planting the seed that grew into the Chrismukkah bush. Sepinwall's oral history of the show, told to him by its cast and producers, sets the scene marvelously. Gussis blurted out the word during a brainstorming session in the writers' room in response to series co-creator Josh Schwartz envisioning Ben McKenzie’s Ryan Atwood and Adam Brody's Cohen having a good natured debate pitting candy canes against menorahs.

"And I’m like, "Oh, it’s Chrismukkah," Gussis said, bringing the room to a halt. She continued by describing an upbringing in which her household was among four Jewish families in the neighborhood, but all of their friends were gentile. "'I grew up celebrating Chrismukkah and also Eastover, but we’re not there yet. That's a different part of the season.' And Josh looked at the room and said, 'Write me an episode about Chrismukkah.'"

Interfaith families had blended their holiday traditions long before "The O.C.," such as on the "Sex and the City" episode that showed Charlotte York attempting to reconcile her conversion to Judaism with her love of Christmas trees, which aired for the first time earlier that year.

But Schwartz's co-creator Stephanie Savage, for whom the episode represents her first produced script, gave Brody the kind of dialogue that sold Seth’s annual tradition as "drawing on the best that Christianity and Judaism have to offer."

"Allow me to elaborate," Seth says. "You see, for my father here, a poor struggling Jew growing up in the Bronx, well . . . Christmas, it meant Chinese food and movie. And for my mom over here — WASPy McWASP — well, it meant a tree, it meant stockings and all the trimmings."

He clinches the sale with the following line: "Other highlights include eight days of presents, followed by one day of many presents. So, what do you think?"

Never mind what I think. I asked Sepinwall what he thinks, since he wrote the book on television (no joke, he co-authored “TV: The Book”) before writing the breezy, entertaining "Welcome to the O.C.," which came out in November.

The relationship between Sepinwall, who is Rolling Stone's chief TV critic, and the show stretches all the way back to 2004 and his first book, "Stop Being a Hater and Learn to Love the O.C." Like Seth's dad, Sandy Cohen, Sepinwall has spent his life navigating the holidays as a Jewish person, providing him with a keen perspective on Seth's enthusiastic reason for the season and what it symbolizes.

The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Let's start with the basics. What were the holiday traditions in your household growing up?

I grew up in a Jewish household, so we would do Hanukkah. We would light the candles, spin the dreidel, eat the latkes, sing the songs. I know a lot of Hanukkah songs in both Hebrew and English.

With my own family, we do some of that but not everything. Certainly, we always love to light the candles and eat the latkes as much as we can now that I'm in middle age. One of the things that we struggle with is we're a family who loves to watch TV and movies together, and there’s not really a lot of Hanukkah content out there. That "Rugrats" special is basically it, unless you want to watch "Eight Crazy Nights," which nobody wants to do.

Was it Hallmark that did a Hanukkah movie recently?

I know there's a new Hanukkah movie this year. It's called "Round and Round," and it sounds like "Groundhog Day" but on Hanukkah. We'll be checking that out later this week, but, yes, there's not a lot, in part because Hanukkah is not a major Jewish holiday. It just happens to occur right around Christmas. Before there were lots of Jews in America . . . it wasn't a big deal. Now, because it occurs around the biggest holiday here for our gentile friends, we make a much bigger deal out of it.

There are many blended families of all different faiths, but I believe "The Best Chrismukkah Ever" took off in part because the idea that Christmas was secular was much more prevalent in 2003, prior to the so-called "war on Christmas." As "The O.C." expert, what do you think was the hook?

It was a few things: Obviously, it happened at the right moment. The show was sort of at the peak of its powers then. (It was still pretty early in the first season.) Everyone was excited, and everyone was talking about it. The show hadn't exhausted itself creatively the way it had in some of the later seasons.

And people loved, loved, loved Seth Cohen. Along with Marissa Cooper, he was one of the two breakout characters on the show at that point. I would argue he was more of the breakout character by this particular moment. People just adored what Adam Brody was doing.

You open an episode where he's trying to explain this holiday to a befuddled Ryan Atwood, as well as being so enthusiastic about explaining it in such detail. It's such a funny scene on a show that could be really funny but could also be really dark.

It's just the exuberance with which Adam Brody says "Chrismukkah" — how excited he is when he hears the word escape Ryan's mouth — and just the phrase "eight days of presents, followed by one day of many presents." Who wouldn't want that?

When I was growing up, I went to a school with many cultures, ethnicities and faiths represented. I had a couple of friends in my class who were Jewish. I remember one of them saying, "You guys are lucky. I get, like, a piece of chocolate and a dreidel."

You get, like, a 12 pack of socks. It's things along those lines.

I'm glad you brought up that line. It kind of sealed the idea that this can be something extra magical. Of course, it also makes the holiday into something that isn't only secular but also consumerist.

I grew up in a community with a lot of Jewish kids, who I went to Hebrew school with, as well as public school. I remember some of them would have what was called the Hanukkah bush. It became this attempt to be like, "OK, we're Jewish, but this stuff seems cool — and we don't want our kids to feel left out — so we're going to find a way to convert it to this."

Christmas is everywhere, and it feels so seductive. It's like the line in the Adam Sandler song when you feel like the only kid in town without a Christmas tree. That is hard — like, it's hard to the point where literally the song is just him listing people who are Jewish to make you feel better. That is how not seasonal depression, but seasonal envy, can sometimes feel.

That song is very memorable. One of my favorite lines is "So drink your gin and tonic-ah / And smoke your marijuana-kkah." I mean, that is good times.

Exactly.

Returning to "The O.C.," I wonder if part of the episode’s draw is there's almost kind of a cultural intelligence assigned to the idea of Chrismukkah.

I think that is right. You know, there's the line early in the opening scene when Sandy (Peter Gallagher) and Kirsten (Kelly Rowan) come in and admit they didn't really know how to raise Seth because the two of them come from such different backgrounds as the Bronx Jew and the Orange County WASP. They sort of left it to him to decide what he wanted. You see even more now where parents are like, "We're going to let them decide what faith they want to observe and what traditions they care about.” Sometimes, you'll see parents say, “We're going to teach them this stuff, but we're not going to make it mandatory." I think I think the show was definitely ahead of the curve on that.

Chrismukkah has become part of our lexicon. Where would you say the word rates in terms of its cultural stickiness?

It's pretty high. I mean, you've got your Festivus, you’ve got Galentine’s Day, you’ve got "Treat Yo Self." ("Parks and Rec" has two, so they did very well there.) There's a tradition of fake TV holidays that somehow crossover. I was shopping for holiday cards the other day, and there were Festivus cards at CVS.

Christmukkah is such a good portmanteau. Chrismukkah has multiple K sounds. It's very appealing to the ear on top of very, very efficiently getting off what it's trying to be. It's way, way up there. Now, you have people who have never seen "The O.C" who don't even know that Chrismukkah was popularized by a show called "The O.C." who still know what Chrismukkah is. That right there is a legacy in and of itself.

To talk a little bit about the significance of "The O.C." more broadly, this is a show that arrived in the midst of prestige TV’s rise. I don't find that it gets as recognized in general conversations about our "Golden Age of Television" as other shows do. What is it about "The O.C." that makes it resonate similarly to other shows of its time? Do you think it's properly respected in popular culture for its reach?

Let me take the second question first because I think it's easier: I think the answer is no, unfortunately.

If people remember the show, they remember it as, “Oh, that was really great for a year, and then it went off the cliff. First of all, I would argue after revisiting the show — rewatching it again and talking to people — there's a lot of very good stuff after the first year. There's also a lot of God awful stuff that nobody would be willing to defend in the book. The point is: Because it was like this comet — it streaked across the sky, it lit up so brightly and it was so exciting but so briefly — it hasn't lasted in the overall TV culture as much as something like Chrismukkah has or as much as the idea of using indie rock as your soundtrack has.

That is unfortunate. I would like to think that this book and the conversation around it surrounding the show's anniversary has brought people back to it and reminded them of how good it was — especially in that first year.

As to the second point, not to make this all about me, but if you look at my bibliography, I've written a book about "The Sopranos," a book about "Breaking Bad" and a lot of other super highbrow shows like "The Wire," "Deadwood," "Lost" and "Battlestar Galactica." I've also written a compendium about the greatest TV shows of all time.

I've done all of these things, and here I've written a book about "The O.C." You would say one of these things isn't like the other. The counter argument I would make is, yes, it was like a teen soap opera, a high school melodrama. "Pretty crying white kids," as the casting director put it at one point in the book. It's all of those things.

But it's a really smart, really self-aware, really funny — and on the dramatic end — really well-executed version of that. It's the best possible version of what it's trying to be. Then, on top of that, you add that layer of comedy, you add that layer of self-awareness where you could open an episode like this one with the Chrismukkah monologue, where you could do an episode where they meet Colin Hanks, basically playing the Adam Brody character on a show within the show that is supposed to be "The O.C." You could do all of that crazy stuff.

I love shows that can be six things at once. "The O.C." was a really good example of that.

In the book, around the part where Josh Schwartz says, "We need to write this episode" about Chrismukkah, he also quips, "Gotta, trademark that [expletive]."

Which they didn’t.

They didn't?

They didn't. "Parks and Rec" didn't trademark "Treat Yo Self," and Mike Schur's still mad about it because it never occurs to anyone that other people are going to start making money off of this silly idea you have that you put into your show.

In the end, has any of your "O.C." rewatch influenced how you're celebrating the holiday?

A couple of nights ago, we lit the menorah, we spun the dreidel and we all sat down like, “Well, what are we going to watch now?" I said, "Guys, I'm going to show you five minutes of something." I put on the opening scene of "Best Chrismukkah Ever," and everyone came out of it very happy.

"Welcome to the O.C." by Alan Sepinwall is available for purchase from major booksellers. "The Best Chrismukkah Ever" — and all four seasons of "The O.C." — can be streamed on HBO Max.