Abby Koenig’s one-woman show, “The Jew Who Loves Christmas” dives into her lifelong affinity for the holidays.
“My family is Jewish, and we always have been like generations and generations and generations, but I grew up celebrating Christmas,” Koenig said.
Christmas, a Christian holiday, is not part of Jewish traditional celebrations. However, some Jewish people take time to volunteer or spend time in the community at Christmas, even if it's not a celebration of the holiday itself.
Koenig realized many years back that she didn’t know how Christmas became a staple holiday in her Jewish childhood home.
“So I started exploring it, and that was the impetus of [the one-woman show], but really it's about my family,” she said.
Koenig said her childhood and family dynamics were challenging, but during the holidays all of that seemed to fade away.
“It was all of a sudden, we were normal,” Koenig said.
Koeing's relationship with Christmas was made more complicated when her sister, Sarah Koenig, died 15 years ago.
Like Abby, Sarah loved the holidays. And Abby wasn’t sure how she wanted to move forward with celebrating.
“I was gonna just give up on Christmas,” Abby said. “Then that sounded crazy to me, like my sister would have never done [that] and she would have been mad, you know.”
Honoring her sister’s life became the driving force for the “The Jew Who Loves Christmas.”
“I think that she'd like that people get to know her a little bit who don't know her and will never know her,” she said. “She was a wonderfully good-hearted person, which is also what I think Christmas is supposed to be about.”
The show uses family photos and videos alongside Abby’s storytelling.
“For the most part, I'd say it's almost as if the video aspect to it are the punch lines,” she said.
While a private person in her day to day life, Abby, who now lives in Louisville, said something about storytelling on stage helps her open up.
“It's just what I love to do and get up in front of people and tell stories, and they're always wildly personal,” she said. “I'm kind of a private person in my regular life, and I think that that's why getting up in front of people and sharing my stories is somewhat comforting to me, sort of removed. And then I'm like, goodbye, and now I'm done.”
She said the performance is a mix of joy and sorrow.
“[I] try to marry those two ideas together, that you still can enjoy the holiday season and reminisce and think about the people that you've lost at the same time,” Abby said. “People coming get excited for laughs, you will, I mean, hopefully cry or feel something.”
She wants “The Jew Who Loves Christmas” to highlight the dichotomy of emotions that often comes with the holidays.
“I hope that [the audience] take away that you can laugh in the face of tragedy and you can also cry,” she said.
Abby also hopes people can walk away inspired to share their own experiences on stage. She hosts a monthly adult story time.
“If anybody walks out and says, ‘I got a story, I got a holiday story that I want to share,’ I'll be like, let's do it,” she said.
“The Jew Who Loves Christmas” makes its debut in Louisville Dec. 13 and 14 at arts cooperative MaybeItsFate on Story Avenue.
