What is the sound of one latke flipping?
The Hebrew calendar, always full of surprises, aligns Hanukkah this year not with Christmas, but with first-semester final exams at colleges and universities across the country. For the first time in 18 years, we will not get to celebrate with our college freshman daughter. What to do? We have shipped a menorah and a box of candles to her so that she and her Christmas-treed roommate can try to enjoy their respective holidays without setting fire to the dorm. We have shipped a Hanukkah care package as well, a few gifts small enough to wedge into her shoebox of a dorm room but big enough, we hope, to bridge the distance. I made latkes for my husband and me this week, in a desperate attempt to translate a pinch of this and a little of that into a measured recipe that Sarah can duplicate for her friends. We're going to have a Hanukkah iChat.
What we're not going to have is the annual latke dinner with three other families that's been a tradition since kindergarten. What the heck were the Israelites thinking, thousands of years ago, when they devised a calendar that wasn't in sync with all those Christmas vacations?
We call it winter break, these days, in a nod to political, secular correctness -- it's everybody's holiday vacation, right? -- but come on. This year we get Hanukkah weeks before Christmas, and Passover weeks after Easter. We're scattered all over the place at holiday time. Kind of like the diaspora, with text-messaging.
Several years back, the federal government decided to celebrate national holidays on the Monday closest to the actual date, to buy everybody the occasional three-day weekend. Racehorses all celebrate their birthdays on January 1, no matter when they were born, for ease in record-keeping. I'm waiting for that kind of adjustment on Hanukkah; I'm waiting for the American Jewish Congress to issue an edict placing the Festival of Lights on the last Monday before Christmas, or the first Wednesday after Black Friday. I wouldn't care what date they chose, as long as it was a) consistent every year and b) close enough to Santa's day to guarantee that college kids and parents would be in the same zip code, preferably one where selected merchandise is one-third off.
Since I doubt that this will happen any time soon, and since the latke dinner has always been at our house, I have taken matters into my own hands. For a single week in early January, all four of the freshmen will be in town, on overlapping breaks from schools on the east coast, in the Midwest, and on the west coast. As far as we are concerned, that is when Hanukkah happens this year. Dozens of latkes, grab-bag gifts; I'm happy to light candles again just to hear that familiar choir of voices lifted in song. The empty-nester fills the house when she can; while the rest of you are recovering from the excesses of New Year's, whether it's too much drink, too much football and onion dip, or all those gifts you had to exchange, we'll be revving up for our holiday.
After all, the miracle of Hanukkah involved a tiny bit of consecrated oil that somehow stretched to keep the temple light lit for eight days, until a new batch could be found. We're celebrating the way that faith trumps time and circumstance, so it's only appropriate to stretch the holiday until we can all be together, to make Hanukkah a moveable feast.
I am not Jewish but I can imagine your frustration with the ever-changing holiday schedule that does not correspond to school holidays etc. And I can certainly relate to the disappointment of not being with family at times when you are supposed to be together. Getting a huge family (which I have) together for an event is an effort that rarely results in having everyone present. When we are all make it we equal 26.
This is NO solution to absent family members by any means...but something you could try. Perhaps the levity it brings will take your mind off the fact that your daughter is far away. I represent a company called ooVoo, which has created an online video conferencing tool. Everyone signs up, logs in, and you see each other while chatting. Part of the fun is the novelty of course but I could see us getting as use to this as we are to picking up the phone to talk to someone. OoVoo is free but you have to have a computer that will support streaming video and you need a webcam. Your daughter could see as well as hear those latkes flipping. Just a thought. Happy Hanukkah.