Here’s one of the things I like best about Harvard: the Hewett-Salters’ annual Chanukah “latke fest,” which this year happened on the night of the annual Messiah sing. Most often the party falls on the Sunday of the town’s ecumenical Christmas pageant and the lighting of the tree on the Common. This year, though, Chanukah came late. But that’s okay, I love it all anyway. I love that at least one of the town’s “other” religions shares town center stage with Christmas in this welcoming, diverse town.

It’s my favorite party of the season, a celebration of Chanukah to which the Hewett-Salters invite all their friends, Christian, Jewish, or whatever, exactly the way Christians of good will have always invited all their friends, of any persuasion, to their Christmas parties, happily assuming that of course they’d love to come.

And come they do. Kathy makes mountains of delicious, crisp, oily, tasty latkes slathered with sour cream and/or apple sauce. Billy produces platters of succulent braised brisket, tender enough to die for. Party guests bring desserts, apple-based and otherwise. Grownups sip wine and gossip about friends and town politics; kids race through the house, upstairs and down. There are dreidels to play with and gold foil–wrapped chocolate coins, “Chanukah gelt,” to munch, and the menorah gleams in the front window, flickering its companionable message to all those electric Christmas lights in all the other windows on the Common.

May this happy coincidence survive; may it inspire others everywhere, worldwide, to similarly revel in each other’s celebrations.