My company is very sensitive to my religious needs. They are letting me make up all twelve days that I had to take off for chagim without requiring me to use any of my ten allotted vacation days (enabling us to make our pilot trip in a month!). They bought me my very own grill and pay for my meat so that I wont feel left out when we have one of our many barbeques during the summer. On Fridays in the Winter I can leave whenever I need to in order to prepare for Shabbos. All things considered it is a great place to work. People are very respectful of my practices (I wear a kippah to work and wrap my tzitzit around my belt) and whenever they have questions regarding to something Jewish, they ask with kavod.

However, every now and again I am faced with some very abject reminder that I am definitely not at Home.

This is my first time working during the American “Holiday Season”. Starting a few days before Thanksgiving, the x-mas decorations started to go up. They really put some effort into it: almost every wall in the office has some red/gold/green decoration, santa, reindeer, snowmen, etc. They even have this neat little thing that plugs into the wall and features some figure skaters moving around in circles. To top it all off, I received an email that informed us that the tree had gone up and that “In the spirit of team, there is an ornament on the tree with each employee’s name”. Yes, for the very first time, someone has made an x-mas tree decoration in my honor.

(To give my employers credit, the office manager did come up to me to let me know that they were getting some menorah decorations, and to find out if there are any other decorations they could get that would help to symbolize my religion).

This is one annual event that I look forward to leaving behind when b”H we make aliyah. Until then, whenever I walk to my desk and look at all of the decorations, I receive the same message: “You are not Home”. Sometimes it is good to have the reminder.