All of my life, it has been a struggle to understand a specific religion because I was not brought up learning about just specific culture. My mother is religiously involved in the catholic faith, and my father is religiously involved in the Jewish faith. Although neither of my parents are very religious, we as a family, are traditional when it comes to celebrating the holidays.

1. People think I am half Catholic, half Jewish. I am NOT! Just because I have one parent who is Catholic and one parent who is Jewish, does not make me half a religion. You cannot believe in half of a religion. My parents made an executive decision that they were going to make all of their children Jewish. Although I was born Catholic because my mom is Catholic, I was converted into Judaism when I was an infant. That conversion is called a Mikveh, which is a bath in which certain religious ceremonies are taken place.

2. My grandparents on my dad’s side (the Jewish ones) made my older sister and I go to Hebrew school. I was always bullied for it because apparently it was funny that I went to a school to learn about my religion. Though it never made sense to me why everyone thought it was funny because a lot of my friends went to religion school, which is the same thing, but learning about a different faith.

3. I am religiously confused. Because I was brought up with two different religions, I never fully understood nor believed in just one religion. I believe that there is a god that I can pray to at my leisure, and that there is someone up in heaven looking out for me, but anything other than that is beyond me. I can’t get myself to believe in one faith because I was brought up with two different ones.

4. I DO NOT GET DOUBLE THE PRESENTS THAN NORMAL KIDS! People think that because I celebrate Christmas and Hanukah that I receive double the amount of presents around the holidays. Those people who think that are wrong. I get presents from my parents on Christmas just like everyone else, and I get presents from my grandparents on both sides of the family, just at different times of the month.

5. Evidently anyone who is Jewish speaks Hebrew. They are extremely mistaken. It is really frustrating that when I tell people that I am Jewish, they ask me to say something in Hebrew. Not every Italian knows how to speak Italian, so I do not know why people think I can automatically speak Hebrew. I know some prayers from Hebrew school, but that is about all I know.

6. Another conflict that I have faced because my mother is catholic and my dad is Jewish is that I never received a communion or a Bat Mitzvah. Being that my sole religion is Jewish I would not be able to receive a communion anyway, but it would have been nice to be confirmed in one of the religions. The deal that my parents made when my siblings and I were converted is that they would not let us get confirmed or have Bat Mitzvah’s. The reason behind that is they did not want us to feel that we are picking one religion over another.

7. Most likely, I am going to marry a Catholic man. Jewish men aren’t really my type, which unfortunately will screw up the system for my children as well and they will have to deal with the same issues that I am dealing with currently. I don’t know if I would convert so they wouldn’t have to go through the confusion, but I have not made that decision yet, and I have time to think about it.

8. Because I am most likely going to marry a catholic man, my holiday card is going to look like the one below.