We follow two traditions in my home.
My husband comes from a house filled with Christmas trees and Santa Claus while I was raised as a secular Jew, so I celebrate Hanukkah.
My family delights in celebrating both holidays during this time of the year: I organize our family’s Hanukkah festivities while my husband runs Christmas.
The weekend before Dec. 25 is when our Christmas decorations go up. My husband likes to keep everything simple when he decorates, so we use a small spool of green, red and blue lights carefully wrapped around the balcony rail.
Inside, we have some simple white and blue lights and a special, rotating light bulb that projects Christmassy-coloured lights around our living room.
We also have a small, reusable Christmas tree that we bought from a thrift store a few years after we got married. It goes in the next to the cat’s favourite chair.
Every year, we use a variety of paper decorations, made by my children in school, to decorate our walls.
I have a favourite. It’s a paper cut-out of an elf, about two feet long, that my son made in kindergarten. The teacher cut out an outline of his face from an enlarged school photo and glued it under the little elf hat. The drawing also has two spindly legs decked in tiny shoes with curled toes. My son coloured it with red and green crayon. I haven’t taken it down since my son brought it home in 2019. It’s taped to the wall in the living room next to the window. In the summer, when the windows are open, the elf, with my son’s grinning face, flaps its little red legs in the breeze.
Every year, we start the festivities with Hanukkah.
This year, Hanukkah started early for us. Jewish holidays tend to move around the year because Jews follow a different calendar. The holiday of Hanukkah starts on the 25th day of the Jewish month of Kislev. This usually places Hanukkah in later half of December — although once, many years ago, I remember celebrating Hanukkah in November.
About a week before Hanukkah starts, I unpack our Hanukkah decorations with a sense of giddy anticipation. I like being a little different and the blue and white colours of our Hanukkah decorations really sets us apart in our neighbourhood.
But this year did not feel the same. When I took out our Season’s Greetings Box to shroud our balcony with Hanukkah gear, there was doubt, and maybe a little bit of fear.
I hesitated because, with everything that is going on in the world right now and how the Palestinian people are being treated, should I shroud the balcony with our Hanukkah gear to celebrate being Jewish?
And is it safe?
Even though Hanukkah and Christmas usually reside in the same month, they aren’t really that similar.
From the outside, Hanukkah might appear like a ritual where we light candles to brighten the world during the darkest time of the year.
But it isn’t simply a celebration of light.
The story says that when the Jews freed themselves from Syrian rule and restored the temple more than 2,000 years ago, they needed to light the lamp over our most sacred religious item: the Torah.
It takes eight days to refine the oil needed for the lamp and there was only enough oil for one day.
The belief is that God granted a miracle and extended time. The lamp oil lasted eight days, enough time to make more. This miracle not only gave us light; it also granted the Jewish people the ability to express their culture and religion in a world that did not want to accept them.
This year, the first day of Hanukkah was on Dec. 8, so we started the celebration on the evening of the Dec. 7.
Jewish holidays always start the evening before the actual holiday date because Jewish people believe that the new day starts with the setting of the sun.
Hanukkah lasts for eight nights. Every night is a celebration. Since Hanukkah is my "job" in my family, I wrap ALL the Hanukkah presents. And this is not a small job. We give each child one present for each night of Hanukkah. So, for us, that means 16 presents.
On the day before the first day, I prepare the special meal, which mostly consists of oily foods: fried potato pancakes (called latkes) and deep fried sufganyot beignets stuffed with jam. You can call them jelly doughnuts.
I used to make them myself, but since Doughnut Love does a much better job, that’s where they come from now. I usually cook the latkes on the first and final night. It’s traditional to eat oily foods on Hanukkah to celebrate the miracle granted the Jewish people by God.
When the sun sets on the day before Hanukkah, we use a special candle holder called a Menorah to light candles to celebrate each night. The Menorah holds nine candles, one for each night with a special candle which sits apart from the others that we call the Shamas or Helper candle.
We light this candle first and we use it to “help” light the others. We start with the first candle on the first night, then each night, we light one additional candle. By the eighth night, the Menorah is so full that it almost burns my fingers as I struggle to replace the Helper Candle into its cup. Being Jewish is never easy.
As a child, in Hebrew school, we regularly referred to our people as the Nation of Israel. Israel, in this case was Jacob, son of Isaac. Jacob became Israel when he fought and defeated an angel. The ancient 12 Nations of Israel are his descendants. In school, I also learned that the modern country of Israel was created out of a reaction to the Holocaust and the horror the world felt when the true extent of what happened came to light. At the time of the Holocaust, there was no Jewish homeland and many Jewish refugees were turned away at national borders, forced to return to uncertain fates.
The country of Israel was formed in the late 1940s and typical of the receding colonizers of the day, it was carved out of the land without any thought for the people who were there before. Its creation triggered a war which displaced an entire population: the Palestinian Arabs. And this historical event was the start of a chain reaction of strife and violence that continues to this day. The creation of Israel was filled with the hope for peace and reconciliation but has turned into the violent, hate-filled mess that exists today.
Jewish parents teach their children about the Holocaust to help them understand the blight that hatred and prejudice can be, and what a blessing it was for the Jewish people to finally have the peace and security of being a part of nation of their own. Some of my earliest memories are of stories and books of that horrible time. And I struggle with the idea that maybe we haven’t finished learning, yet. Have we done enough to create peace?
Right now, can I be proud of being Jewish? Are we, as the Nation of Israel doing ‘God’s Will’ by treating the Palestinian people the way that we have for decades? And if we aren’t, and I don’t believe for a moment that we are, then how do we properly deal with an area of the world that refuses to grant the Nation of Jewish people the right to exist?
I am not an expert and I can’t answer these questions. Although, I wish I could for my children’s sake. But this year, I ended up decorating my townhouse with blue and white lights and Hanukkah decorations because my kids love them so. We celebrated with love, latkes and all sorts of fried food to rejoice in the miracle of oil and light. And to bring cheer to our lives during the darkest of times.
Here in Port Moody, there really is no good reason to have concerns for our security. I know that my family is safe. My children and their friends know and accept that both holidays can thrive together and the people in the Tri-Cities and Port Moody are so welcoming.
This year we celebrated the love and security that we are lucky enough to experience. There are still doubts and worry, but there is also hope. We rejoice in the understanding and joy that we see around us, pledging to find ways to spread that feeling.
And, on the morning of Dec. 18, the Hanukkah decorations will come down, and the red and green twinkly lights will go up, along with our second-hand Christmas tree.
We wish everyone a happy and safe season with best wishes for the peace, that we long for, to come.
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