I’ll admit it right here and now: I don’t know much about Hanukkah. I know that there are latkes, potato pancakes fried golden brown and served with apple sauce and sour cream and I like those, and I learned just today from a friend that jelly doughnuts are part of the celebration, too, and I am definitely easy to be found whenever there is a good doughnut nearby. And I know the gist of the celebration, revolving around a small flask of oil that kept the lamp of the Temple at Jerusalem burning for eight days and nights, much longer than it ever should have, long enough for a new supply of oil to be attained, and this is the miracle that is commemorated with each Hanukkah celebration, each lighting of the menorah.
Hanukkah is another festival of lights. We see these festivals in cultures across the globe, but it is fitting, I think, that so many occur now, in these darkest nights of the year on the approach to the winter solstice. This year, Hanukkah begins with the setting sun tonight, December 16, and lasts for eight days and nights. It is a movable celebration: Last year it happened to begin just before Thanksgiving, and one year not long ago, perhaps 2005, it coincided with Christmas. Old Aunt Sarah across the street made latkes that year and shared some with Seth and me. It was cold here that December, like it’s been this year, and the chill of the winter nights brought her back to her childhood and the dark nights of Hanukkah frying latkes with her mother in North Carolina, the place from whence Old Aunt Sarah hails. We enjoyed latkes that year because she had set the smoke alarm off a few times in making them, and Seth had gone over to check on her. She only makes latkes in large batches, she told him. It’s the only way she knows.
“Here, have some,” she said. She put a latke on a plate and then, next to it, a dollop of apple sauce. And then she put a whole bunch on a bigger plate. “Take some to your friend.” That’s me. That was on Christmas Eve, and that year our traditional Christmas Eve dinner of many fishes, which is our Southern Italian custom, included also many latkes. It was a pretty good combination.
This year, Hanukkah begins tonight and ends on Christmas Eve. Who knows, we may have latkes with our Christmas Eve dinner again, should Old Aunt Sarah be up to it. We’ll listen for the smoke alarm.
Image: Women at the Stove by Wojciech Piechowski. Oil on oak, 1888. [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons.