I’m the Jew who writes Christmas movies

Since January, I’ve spent much of the year thinking about Christmas. Christmas traditions. Christmas songs. Christmas spirit. And now, after the Halloween candy is long-gone from clearance racks and Christmas music has started to play everywhere, now is when I cease to give the holiday another moment’s thought.

Because I’m Jewish. And while I may not celebrate Christmas, my work immerses me in the holiday spirit for much of the summer and fall.

As a Jewish screenwriter. I’ve made my living in the past few years writing TV movies for the Hallmark and Lifetime channels—mostly romantic comedies, and once, a “woman in jeopardy” baby-stealing number—but this year every project I worked on was a Christmas movie. I was hired as writer (or rewriter) on three TV movies, one of which is The Flight Before Christmas, airing December 5 and starring this very website’s founder, Mayim Bialik. (Read about her experience with this film here).

I wrote my first Christmas movie in 2009, hired by a production company to develop a story they wanted to make for the Hallmark Channel. I was told by executives that the first draft needed “more Christmas.” The characters were already engaging in many of the obvious Christmas traditions and I was out of ideas. I got a laugh in the room when I said, “Well, tell me what else you people do. This isn’t my holiday.”

It’s an easy punchline, the Jew writing Christmas movies. My family and friends love to comment on the irony, probably because most people—writers, entertainment industry professionals, or others—consider the writer’s role to be “write what you know.” And when writers step out of what we perceive as their comfort zones, no matter their professional achievements, we challenge their right to tell the story.

Must writers have experienced the stories before they write them? Ron Nyswaner, writer of the film Freeheld, was interviewed on NPR’s Take Two and asked if, as an openly gay man, he had any concerns writing about the struggles of a lesbian couple. Interviewer Alex Cohen said, it has often been suggested that “…when it comes to big, important films about women… it’s best that it be written by a woman.” Jill Soloway created the critically-acclaimed Amazon series Transparent after her own father came out to the family as transgender. But even Soloway admitted in a New York Times interview in 2014 that she expected criticism despite her personal experience.

As for me, no one ever questioned my writing abilities when my resume predominantly listed romantic comedies, despite the fact that—until I met my husband—my own love life left much to be desired. (In fact, my friends used to take an almost-giddy, Schadenfreude-like pleasure from hearing my reports from the dating front.) I’ve been a fan of romantic comedies since I was a young girl, back when I couldn’t possibly relate to the emotions being expressed between the characters. To this day, my all-time favorite movie is When Harry Met Sally, though I’ve never had a male friend who became a love interest. One of my most successful Hallmark movies was about an uptight, French chef falling for a widowed father, though I am neither, and I might write about a bitter breakup that looks nothing like anything I’ve experienced in my own life.

By 2015, when I was writing The Flight Before Christmas, the producers cast Mayim and wanted me to rewrite her character as Jewish, which I resisted. The movie is all about Christmas—shoe-horning in a protagonist who talked about oil lasting eight nights during that first Hanukkah celebration just wouldn’t have made any sense. Couldn’t Mayim play an Italian? Or pass for someone Greek? In the end she was happy to play a character that celebrated both Hanukkah and Christmas. Because she’s an actress. It’s what she does. And much to my surprise, I became the champion of Christmas. Because I’m the writer. And that’s what I do.

I think that “write what you know” advice was initially used to comfort and guide fledgling writers, to help us focus our ideas and give us confidence in our stories. You know, start with something you feel comfortable with, that you can actually develop from beginning to end. But if writers only ever wrote from the knowledge in their own heads and the experiences from their own lives we’d never have the science fiction or historical fiction genres. The Martian, which killed it at the box office, would never have been made, and if the James Bond movies had been written by actual spies, I’m fairly certain it would be an issue of national security.

Every June for the past several years I’ve taught screenwriting to teenagers through a non-profit organization called Inner-City Filmmakers. Before they start writing, my students will pitch an idea for the three-minute movie they’ll produce. One year, a young man pitched a complicated idea about a man with schizophrenia and his break-up with a girlfriend. I questioned how he’d reconcile two plot points in such a short film and asked, why this story? When he said he thought it would be cool to show the guy’s hallucinations through different production techniques, I laid into him in front of the class. Schizophrenia, I told him, was a serious mental health disorder. You don’t make a movie about it because you think “it would look cool.” Rather, you show the disease and those who suffer from it with the respect they deserve, both in doing careful research and in what you put on the page.

That is what we all should mean when we talk about writing what you know: write with care and passion and do your homework if need be. Ron Nyswaner and Jill Soloway (and hundreds upon thousands of other writers and directors) don’t have to match their own realities with the worlds they depict on screen in order to bring those worlds honestly and thoughtfully to their audiences.

I don’t have to decorate a pine tree with tinsel in order to understand the feelings of family, togetherness and joy that everyone wants to feel around the Christmas holiday. Besides, clichéd as it may seem, my Christmas Day is usually all about movies; seeing movies and eating Chinese take-out with my Jewish family and friends. We experience those same feelings of family, togetherness and joy, perhaps just over egg drop soup rather than egg nog.