Today is the first day of Chanukah this year, but last night was the first night. Almost no printed calendars ever get this right, and it's insulting. How hard would it be to print "First Night of Chanukah" on the correct date instead of "First Day of Chanukah" in the next day box over? It just creates extra confusion, yet another gap in understanding between the Jewish world and the rest of the world. Besides, for whom are the publishers doing that? No one Jewish cares when the first day of Chanukah is; it's the festival of lights, of lamplight and candlelight, of lights that can happen only when there is dark. The first night is what matters.
It was an odd Jewish family in which I was raised. I was not bat mitzvahed, and the excuse I was given was that only the bar mitzvah (for boys) was authentic. The bat mitzvah (for girls) was something out of Women's Lib*, and Women's Lib was just about as bad as Communism.
It was very important that we be Jewish and not be ashamed or secretive about it, but also not make a big deal about it and not look or act especially Jewish, at least not in public. I was quite sure I knew what that meant when I was a child, but now, every time I try to figure it out, to point to one behavior or affectation and say, "That! That's it!" I instead find myself saying, "But no, because Xs are like that, too." The feeding and the eating? Hello, Italians, Mexicans, Filipinos, Chinese? Muslims, Catholics, Hindus? And the Type A** thing -- look, WASPs, don't take this the wrong way, but we've got nothing on you. Martha Stewart is not a Jew as far as I know, and I don't think Tim Gunn is either. Okay, well, how 'bout all that bipolar disorder? Yeah, well, most of the bipolars I know in Massachusetts seem to be of non-Jewish Irish descent -- which, by the way, supposedly so am I, a little bit, but not all the bipolars in my family were. All right then, how 'bout the knock-down, drag-out arguments that never, never die? Er -cough- Muslims -cough- Catholics -cough- Hindus -- even that is not strictly Jewish. There's nothing behavioral that is uniquely Jewish, nothing, except specific traditions like lighting candles in memory of one specific little triumph over darkness thousands of years ago. And bottom line, everybody else has got something like that, too.
Raising us throughout the Cold War, our parents were very concerned that we enjoy the freedom and diversity of American culture (as long as we didn't become Communists, hippies, or women's libbers) -- our people had come here to become Americans, after all -- but that we not get "confused." I think they were as worried about confusing themselves. Long before I was born, in the early childhood of my older sister and into the first few years of my brother's life, they had Christmas trees -er- Chanukah bushes, but they stopped for fear of that confusion. Their last Chanukah bush was planted in our yard and had grown very, very tall by the time I was old enough to play under it, but it never exactly thrived. It was always kind of yellow and shed a constant thick carpet of golden needles all over the yard, so many that they stained the local sedimentary rock yellow, which made me think I'd found gold when I was five or six years old.
Instead, somewhere in the middle of my childhood, we acquired from the gift shop at the temple a large Star of David made of strips of wood about an inch thick and painted blue and white. It stood about five feet tall on a stand made of more of the same wood. My mother quickly created the tradition of putting it up next to the fireplace and then "decorating" it every year by Scotch-taping foil-wrapped chocolate Maccabees all over it, which we were only allowed to eat with permission and a limit so that they would last through all eight nights of Chanukah. On the last night, we greedily ate however many were left.
It occurs to me now that the devouring of foil-wrapped chocolate Maccabees is not the same as the devouring of foil-wrapped Chanukah gelt (chocolate money you win playing dreydel) or Santas or Rudolphs or, in turn, Easter Bunnies. It's more like devouring foil-wrapped chocolate French resistance fighters of the Nazi occupation or foil-wrapped chocolate American revolutionary Minutemen. I wonder what might be the modern equivalent. I wonder what chocolate effigies of today will be devoured on holidays a thousand or more years from now, if there are holidays or chocolate a thousand or more years from now.
Right now, there are holidays and chocolate, and now is where we are, so whether Chanukah is something you call your own or not, I hope you are enjoying whatever you can. And if like me you are more devoted to sweets than religion or the culture of a specific heritage, I hope you can find suitable heroic effigies confected and wrapped in all your favorite colors.
(Anybody know where I can get a set of chocolate suffragists?)
__________
* I do not believe this is the slightest bit true. I have never read even a single sentence anywhere to support this. My sister has confirmed my suspicion that this is something my parents made up to protect themselves from having to go to the trouble, especially since they believed that I would only be interested in the whole thing for about five minutes, and that those five minutes would end sometime during the extensive preparations for but well in advance of the scheduled date of the actual event. We will not discuss why my sister believes they expected this.
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** Yes, I'm using this term as it is understood colloquially, not clinically. Colloquially when we use the expression "Type A" we generally mean driven, detail-oriented, perfectionist, judgmental, maybe even competitive. To the Type A person colloquially speaking there is a Right Way to do things and there is also a distinctly Wrong Way, and the Wrong Way is any way that is not the way of the Type A individual in question. Clinically, on the other hand, the condition involves immense personal insecurity and also walking around with a constant, health-threatening level of hostility, the kind that could give you a heart attack and/or get you into bar fights. Though a bar fight involving Martha Stewart and/or Tim Gunn might be something to see, it's nothing I either hope for or envision realistically. (If it ever does happen, though, I'm sure Bravo will be there to share it with us.)
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I tried to photograph them -- poorly as you can see by my only clear shot of any of them, the tiny inset at left -- for they are very beautiful with their dark masks, rose-brown-to-finch-yellow belly gradients and tails that look as though they have been dipped in bright yellow paint, just at the very ends. (For a better view of them, check the 
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