The association between the colors and the holiday is newer than you may think
t’s no secret that the American holiday calendar is thoroughly color-coded. The Fourth of July is red, white and blue, for obvious reasons. Halloween hasorange, and the Thanksgiving table tends to be festooned in the brown and red colors of the harvest season. And as those autumnal hues begin to fade, the red and green of Christmas take their place.
In the post-World War II United States, as more Jewish families began moving to suburbs, the holiday season presented a problem for parents. One solution was to make Hanukkah a bigger deal, despite the fact that it hadn’t previously been considered as such. Because the events the holiday commemorates took place after the time period covered by the Old Testament, its observance is not biblically mandated, explains Jack Wertheimer, a professor of American Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.
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