Like a lot of people, I tend to picture the holidays of my youth like a Norman Rockwell painting: My sister stringing garland around the tree, me in the kitchen lighting the menorah, my brother spinning a dreidel as Andy Williams croons “Sweet Little Jesus Boy.” Although I don’t recall ever seeing that scene depicted on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post.

Yes, it can be disorienting when religions collide under one roof. With a Catholic father and a Jewish mother (and none of us practicing either religion in any discernible way), my family was committed to commemorating all the holidays that came down the pike, including, in no particular order, Hanukkah, Christmas, Easter, Passover and, if my mother’s Bubbe was in town, Yom Kippur. (Fortunately for us, Bubbe lived out her final years in Israel, where we were somehow able to convince her that the reason she hadn’t seen my bar mitzvah pictures was because I had been 12 for the past four years.)

And that type of holiday tradition continues in my home today, despite the fact that I have a wife who actually knows what she believes in. (Theresa is Catholic but is an ardent admirer of “Fiddler on the Roof.”) She feels that it’s important that I teach our two children, now 6 and 8, about their Jewish heritage, even if I picked up most of it from Neil Simon movies.

Added complication: Unlike when I was young, when (in my neighborhood, anyway) even Hanukkah was considered rare and exotic, children nowadays are introduced to basically every holiday ever celebrated by anyone. “Do we celebrate Kwanzaa?” my son Tim asked me several years in a row, each time a bit more hopeful that this year we’d be African-American.

Nowadays, we not only get TV specials devoted to Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, but also carefully placed mentions of Ramadan, Dawali and Las Posadas.

The good news is, my kids’ encyclopedic knowledge of the world’s winter holidays has inspired me to learn more myself, especially about my own background. To that end, in the last few years I’ve gone back and relearned the story of Hanukkah, the rules of playing dreidel, the prayer over the candles (as a kid I never got past Baruch Atah Adonai), and I even dug up a copy of the late Shari Lewis’ Hanukkah special; it seems Lamb Chop was unabashedly one of the Chosen Puppets.

My kids are Catholic, so Christmas is obviously holiday numero uno for them each December, but I have to say there’s something gratifying about watching them light the Menorah and spin the dreidel in between hanging stockings and eating Christmas cookies — it’s nice to see that connection to the past moving into the future, even if they wind up as confused as I am.

Besides, I figure somehow, somewhere, I might see Bubbe again, and this could help assuage some of the guilt.

Peter Chianca is an editor and columnist for Gatehouse Media New England.