My parents were Orthodox Jews but weren’t as strict as many Orthodox. My mother kept a kosher house. But when my father took us out to eat, we were allowed to stray from kosher food.
We would all go to temple for the big holidays – Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, and Passover. My parents wouldn’t drive on the holidays so we would walk 5 miles to the temple in Norwich. The women and girls were required to sit upstairs. We didn’t really celebrate Hanukkah and certainly never exchanged gifts. It just wasn’t done in our family.
When I was 8 or 9, some of my siblings and I would congregate in front of the Orthodox temple and then walk down to the Reform temple. We wanted to get away from the Orthodoxy and to hear the prayers in English. My mother didn’t say much about it, but my father didn’t approve. Let’s just say he was skeptical about whether Reform Judaism could be considered Judaism.