Jews aren't supposed to love Christmas.

Historically, our job as Jews was to resist its charms, suspect its motives, endure its excesses. At best, in a Diaspora where schools were public and Christianity assumed, we were supposed to grin and bear it. At worst, in a Diaspora where Jews were vilified and Christianity a cause, we were supposed to survive the murderous pogroms that at times attended it.

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We were never supposed to love it.

That's why it comes as such a shock, that so many of us do.

This week, the New York Times' second most e-mailed article was "Jewish in a Winter Wonderland," a paean to Christmas by author and Sex and the City executive producer Cindy Chupak, who details with tinsel-trimmed glee how she and her husband, both of them Jews, "proceeded to embrace the holiday in all of its materialistic glory."

Most of us Jews who love Christmas, by contrast, do so with discretion, marveling under our breaths at the majesty and whimsy of the season, the sudden congeniality of the populace, the earthly paradise of lights and costumed trees and good wishes and good will.

In fact, judging by the many observant Jews who have vocally defended the right of Christians to celebrate the holiday publicly and openly, the secret society of Jews who love Christmas even includes no small number of the scrupulously devout, those who fear and obey the letter and the law and the Lord of Moses alone.

And why not? Christmas, beyond the hype and the Month of Black Fridays mega-marketing, seems to pry the best out of people. Once a year, zealous defense of privacy thaws, the ideology of avarice yields to gestures of charity and generosity.

Once a year, in the Western world, people take on the characteristics of human beings.

Here in the East, for those of us who live in the place where Jesus was born, there's a message for us as well:

The birth of every infant is the ultimate prayer for peace.

It is God's sign that blood grudges and land grudges - carefully nurtured, treasured, handed-down, polished and exported into an entire cultural heritage - are the Devil's work.

There's a message to this holiday that this place needs to hear, Muslim, Jew or Christian:

We can choose to bear our grudges into the grave. Or we can choose to look again at our lives, the way we look at a newborn.

As if this had never happened this way before.

As if God had given the world a second chance.