BOB ABERNETHY: Our Cover Story this week is about the experiences of an increasing number of American families at this time of year. The December dilemma is a story of Hanukkah and Christmas celebrations, mixed marriages, and children. Our correspondent is Mary Alice Williams.

MARY ALICE WILLIAMS: It is an incongruous picture, and it is being composed by some 770,000 interfaith families in America. When rich holiday traditions coincide and often collide, they can force painful compromises, but not in the home of Ed and Moira Wiener.

MOIRA WIENER: In some ways, I'm perhaps more religious now than I used to be.

Mr. and Ms. WIENER (In Unison): Welcome, bride. Sabbath, the Queen of all days.

WILLIAMS: Moira Wiener is Catholic, Ed, Jewish -- one celebrating the Messiah, the other still awaiting him. They have replaced a daunting theological dissonance with what is, to them, harmony. The wedding goblet Ed's foot crushed in accordance with Jewish tradition was wrapped in her grandmother's Irish linen.

They were lucky. They had the support of their families and the presence of both Father Michael Kelly and Rabbi Ezra Blecher, who together co-officiated interfaith marriages in defiance of their own hierarchies' edicts.

Father MICHAEL KELLY: If you don't have God as part of your marriage, it's not going to work.

Rabbi EZRA BLECHER: I'm not there necessarily to approve of the mixed marriage, but to show the support for whatever continuity of Jewish identity is possible.

WILLIAMS: His presence is also helpful to the propagation of Judaism. A 1995 study by the Jewish Outreach Institute indicates two thirds of interfaith married by a rabbi raise their children as Jews. In marriages where no rabbi officiated, only about a quarter pass on their faith, and to Judaism, that's critical.

Rabbi BLECHER: What concerns me is the perpetuation of the Jewish people. I do believe that the survival of the Jewish people as a minority is threatened by marriage outside the community.

WILLIAMS: Today, more than half of all Jews marry into another religion. Jewish elders worry that intermarriage may have the effect of accomplishing what centuries of oppression and state-sanctioned anti-Semitism dating to Exodus could not: it's diminishing their numbers, threatening the very survival of a 4,000-year-old system of values and ideals.

Moira is required by the Catholic Church to do all in her power to baptize her children in the faith and raise them in the Church, but, like this baby-naming ceremony, the Wieners practice a hybrid of Catholic and Jewish ritual that works for them.

WIENER Family (In Unison): And grant us all good health. Amen.

WILLIAMS: Their prayers are daily and free form. They attend temple on High Holy Days and midnight Mass on Christmas. Some theologians call this "cafeteria Catholicism" or "Judaism at the latke level" -- religion watered down.

Ms. WIENER: Yes, we've had people, like all interfaith couples, sort of make the "You can't be -- this isn't like ice cream. You can't put chocolate and vanilla together and make Neapolitan. It just doesn't work like that." It works pretty well for us because we round up in the same package really being able to keep those separate flavors and yet come up with something that overall is a new flavor unto itself.

WILLIAMS: The exponential growth in new "flavors" has spawned a market for the greeting-card game. Jewish/Hindu/Muslim/Methodist amalgams are radically changing religious identification in this country. But while we celebrate our diversity, what's happening to the kids?