Today’s post is more “show and tell” than an educational experience. Most families have special decorations that are a big part of their holiday experience, and although I have admitted several times to being a holiday decorating scrooge in general, I do have a few Hanukkah pieces that I totally adore. You saw the first one a couple of weeks ago, when the thirteen-year-old drew an excellent replica of it on the blackboard at Religious School. My grandmother made this ceramic menorah. The front of it says “lehadlik ner shel hanukkah”, which is the last line in one of the Hanukkah candle lighting blessings. The entire blessing: Transliterated Hebrew: Baruch…

Growing up, whenever one of my friends found out that I’m Jewish, I heard alot of this kind of thing: “Whoa! You get EIGHT NIGHTS of gifts at Hanukkah! That’s so cool!” I have always been slightly annoyed by this, for a couple of reasons that changed as I got older. First, from my point of view as a young Jewish girl, the idea of Christmas gifts was just totally better than Hanukkah gifts, hands down. Who could think that eight nights of gifts in a row could top the excitement of running down the stairs in your footie pajamas, seeing the motherlode sitting under a gorgeous tree festooned with…

Today’s post is all about the “controversy” about the spelling of the word Hanukkah. Or Chanukah. Or Hanuka. Or…well, you get the idea. Everyone wonders what the “correct” spelling is, and there’s a pretty simple answer. In Hebrew, there is only one:חנוכה In English, there are no “correct” or “incorrect” ways to spell it, because it’s all up to the person transliterating it. Because a couple of the Hebrew letters have a few different options (the main one being that the beginning of the word Hanukah can have the “h” sound, or the “ch” sound, as in the last part of the word “Blech!”), the different spellings come oozing out…