Google "Hannukah Decorations" and you'll come up with only a slightly less lame selection of foil dreidels and plastic menorahs that you'll find stuck in the back corner of your local CVS.
I don't say this resentfully: Jews themselves tend to be ambivalent about their trumped up competitor to Christmas. They don't traditionally "decorate" for it. And it's mostly just in North America that yuppie Jewish parents (of which I am one) get anxious about how envious and excluded their children will feel amidst all the glittering Yuletide greenery. This year is no different, despite the grinchy economic pall that has fallen over retailers. In some ways, the recession will only add to Jewish anxiety -- for once the commercialism and materialism will be subdued, and we will all be implored to remember the "true meaning" of Christmas. Which is the part we Jews are most forbidden to celebrate.
In our house, we try to make our Hannukah as festive as possible. When our now-teenage children were small, I would pile up eight presents for each of them under a date palm in our living room. On the first night, we would blast Handel's "Judas Maccabeas" over the sound system. I discovered that Julia Child's "grated potato galette" made for a much tastier and crisper latke than the traditional soggier recipes -- especially when accompanied by crème fraiche, salmon roe, and champagne for the adults. Together we'd light the first candle in my husband's inherited menorah, after which the children would dive at their pile of presents and search for the package marked "One." Their remaining gifts were labeled for the subsequent nights of Hanukkah, to be opened after the evening candle lighting. It was lovely but, well, unfailingly mediocre compared to what they saw taking place in the homes of their non-Jewish friends.
Fortunately, children are natural chauvinists about their own customs. For a long time they could be persuaded that the guarantee of eight presents over as many nights was more fun than a single morning of ripping open gifts. And -- full disclosure -- since I am a convert, there was always the back-up of "Christmas at Grandma's" which would satisfy their desire to decorate trees and believe in Santa.
Still, the children would pester us to expand our Hannukah celebrations to include decorations, games, and even lights (they knew better than to push for a tree). One year, a pathetic string of light-up plastic menorahs made it onto the date palm. They were good sports about spinning the dreidel, even when they didn't know the official rules of the game. They obligingly ate the bags of chocolate gelt that had not been accidentally mixed in with the stale ones from the previous year. And their father didn't mind if I played jazzy Christmas tunes alongside the klezmer, because who, after all, wrote these tunes?
Then, suddenly, a miracle happened. No, the crummy menorah candles that melt all over the windowsill did not burn for eight straight nights. Rather, this year, for the first time, my husband caved in to our 15-year-old son's irrefutable argument that a "festival of light" should be a FESTIVAL. OF. LIGHT.
At last I'd been given license to unleash my inner goy.
But to what end? After surfing such websites as "bargainjudaica.com," I discovered that if I did not want to go the foil dreidel route, my only other choice was to launch a giant inflatable menorah on our front lawn (Where is the Jewish Martha Stewart?!). So I gave up on the internet and drove to our local plant store. I returned an hour later, my trunk laden with evergreen boughs, pine roping, ivory pointsettas, blue ribbon and silver pinecones.
For the rest of the afternoon, I fussed on the back porch with recalcitrant spruce branches and florist wire. My husband poked his head out a few times, suspicious of what I was up to.
"Go away, " I snapped, just as my mother used to do when she had to deal with tangled strings of lights and our tinsel wars. Hadn't I always felt that my conversion to Judaism liberated me from this annual hassle?
"I'll call you when it's done," I said a little more patiently. "It's a surprise."
Finally it WAS done. I presented my husband with a wreath shaped like the Star of David, complete with a blue silk bow, silver pinecones, and twinkly white lights.
"That's...fantastic!"
"Really? You don't think it's too--?"
"No!" He examined it admiringly. "Actually, there's nothing intrinsically Christian about greenery," he allowed. "The custom is originally Druidic. In fact, if you go back to Roman times..." He proceeded to give me a thoroughly Talmudic explanation about why my wreath conformed to the highest Rabbinical authorities -- one with which our own conservative Rabbi agreed when I later put it to him.
Now our mantles are decked out with spruce, poinsettias and ivory candles. The Star of David sparkles on our front door. I'm eyeing running blue and white lights through our bushes. This year (as another first) we are planning to hold a Hannukah party -- mainly as a fundraiser for our synagogue. When guests arrive, they'll be served a Maccabee Martini (gin mixed with blue curacao -- a liqueur discovered and manufactured originally by a Jewish family).
Who says Jews can't adapt the customs of their surrounding communities without surrendering their Jewish identities?
After all, we've been doing it for thousands of years.
TO MY JEWISH READERS: Please share the ways you decorate for and celebrate Hannukah! Below is my "Hannukah Wreath."
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Rabbi Claus - he was an enterprising Rabbi who saw that Christians were honoring Christ with gifts to one another, so he started to make toys for kids and gifts for his Christian neighbors. He would offer them as gifts to the community. Somebody back in the old days didn't like his "commercialization" and "materialization" of the holiday, so he was chased up a chimney, where his socks fell off below the mantle. Pursued all the way across Europe, he fled by sled driven by deer to the far northern reaches, and finally settled somewhere near the north pole. Every Hannukah, and Christmas, this Rabbi Claus returns to give gifts to all good children in an ecumencial spirit of giving and love.
Not a bad thought. If it brings greater cross-faith understanding to people who celebrate the Season. It would fit in nicely with the old Druidic concept of coming together to honor the common heritage we all share with one another and with our natural world.
She was at her sister's home on Christmas day. Somehow her 9 year niece had escaped learning that Santa Claus wasn't real - until her nephew blew it that morning. She stormed into the kichen and demanded of her mother, "You've always promised to tell me the truth. Tell me now - is there really a Santa Claus?" Her mother said, "Ask your Aunt Elizabeth."
Elizabeth's answer - "Well, you know how you feel when you find the PERFECT present to give your Mom for Christmas, or you make something for her that she's wanted for a really long time. You are so excited because you just know how much she's going to love it. And then it's finally Christmas morning and you're unwrapping a present of your own, and you look over and see that she's got your present on her lap and she's beginning to unwrap it. And you stop, and you just watch her because you're so excited? Well, grown-ups call that feeling, Santa Claus."
May we all remember ....
christmas envy, like what has become the christmas tradition, is an ode to the god of materialism. i don't think the druids had the pleasure of meeting that god.
ModernTribe.com's mission is to find Hanukkah decorations (and Judaica) befitting of younger, hipper, more design conscious Jews. And we don't sell kitsch! For example, ModernTribe.com sells those beautiful paper star lanterns you see -- but ours are Magen Davids (made in Israel no less). If you want to make your own, we have a great new book called Crafting Jewish by Rivky Koenig.
-- Founder, ModernTribe.com
from the pagans, druids, and indigenous peoples, often by
destroying their cultures. It was all celebrated by those groups
first, along with greenery, candles, lights, altars, feasts, gifts,
rituals, and on essentially the exact same days.
Let's face it, all the holidays we celebrate right now concern the Winter Solstice, which arrived today by the way. We are celebrating the return of the sun and the lengthening days. It's been pretty well proven that Jesus was born in the summer months. IMO most religions stories are myths pasted on the Yule because of the older religions like Saturnalia. At this time of year we have Christmas, Hanukkah, Eid, and Kwanzaa. It's not just a coincidence they all fall around Solstice. I'd like to lump them all together and we could celebrate Festivus, which has a real old religion sound to it, but I have an aversion to wrestling family members.
I don't understand why there aren't more Hanukkah decorations. With the blue and white color theme you could make it so sparkly. A white tree with blue lights and decorations would be wonderful. Maybe a few dreidels to add a bit of color would be nice.
What do you need in the way of "enlightenment?" Calendars didn't start printing this ancient holiday until recently because much of the country wasn't Jewish. And still isn't. Perhaps the commercialism of our time has enlightened calendar publishers to be more inclusive of holidays from different cultures so as to to gain greater market share for their products.
In fact, I am now seeing Muslim holidays like Ramadan and Ashura and the various Eids showing up in Calendars only in the past couple of years. Its a business decision to attract more Muslim buyers of calendars.
What part of that is hard to understand?
We *always* host a huge Latke Feast here at my house, and my friends probably don't care or even think about how untraditional is our Traditional Pinata. Hey, you have chocolate coins, candy, dreidels, tiny Chanukah puzzles, what better delivery system than a papier mache pinata?
We love to mix up our traditions here. So I've made Puerto Rican "coquito" and I'm baking a Kentucky Derby Chocolate Pie. I make 20lbs of potatoes into 30lbs of latkes (+five pounds = onions, oil). This year, I imported 7 pounds of Wisconsin cheese curds, which we're going to batter and fry like we do in the Midwest, the perfect intersection of Minnesotan and Jewish tradition. I'm sure the kids will appreciate the innate superiority of "our" fried cheese to those rubbery, processed mozzarella sticks they serve here in New Jersey!
Maybe we don't do the decorations like our neighbors do, but I am decorating for the party with blinky lighted snowman and candy canes. Call it Chrisnukah or Festivus or Saturnalia, but to my mind there's only one way to greet the coming winter: Thumb your nose at it with a happy gathering of family and friends, plus lots of fattening food.
Then spend the next 2 months getting the smell of frying oil out of your house...
My Holiday party this year is a Hanukkah Appetizer, Christmas Dinner and A Movie. We show Jimmy Stewart's, "It's a Wonderful Life." Anyway, I figured my friends that are Jewish had plans but everyone is really excited to come over to my house now. I want to have cookies for all the little ones to decorate.
Seriously, where is the Jewish Martha Stewart