Light 06: Hanukkah

Welcome to the 2023 Advent Calendar, which this year is just a list of things that light up all pretty. Previous entries are here. If you enjoy this and want to encourage me to bang more things out on a keyboard, consider supporting my Patreon, or sending something off of my Christmas list. If you'd rather support my spoiled pets, their Ratmas list is here. If you want to spend money but not on me, you can direct your donations to Mainely Rat Rescue, who handles rescue and foster operations for rats, mice, gerbils, guinea pigs, and other small mammals in the New England area, or the MSPCA, where my critters got their medical care before I found a good exotics vet, and where I picked up Koda and Yogi. 

Enjoy your trip through the cavalcade of things that go blinky-blink in the dark!

Hanukkah is another one of those "festival of lights" deals, and honestly it's a pretty minor holiday on the Jewish calendar. This year it starts at sunset on December 7th on the Gregorian calendar, and runs through December 15th. 

Technically, Hanukkah does have a historical basis, celebrating the dedication of the reconstructed Temple. The way it's usually explained to non-Jewish kids in school is that it commemorates that one time when the lamp oil lasted a lot longer than everybody thought it would. In practice, so far as I have seen from the outside, it's mostly an excuse to get together, have some latkes, hand out little presents, and then chat with the other adults while the kids gamble for chocolate. I dig it; I, too, enjoy small gifts, potato pancakes, and novelty candy. 

The primary relevance of Hanukkah for the purposes of this year's meditation on lights is the menorah, one of the few parts of the holiday recognized by Americans who don't celebrate it. Those used in the home have nine candles: One for each night of the holiday, and the shamash, used for lighting the rest. One candle is lit on the first night, and each night you light one candle more than the previous, until on the last night of the holiday the entire menorah is alight. 

The traditional form of a menorah is a nine-branch candelabra, but I have seen some far more creative variations. A former roommate had one shaped like a dachshund, with the nightly candles on its back and the shamash on the top of its head. I'm friends with a couple where one partner is Jewish and the other is Chinese-American; they have one where the candle stems are mahjong tiles. Amazon has one shaped like a dinosaur. You can buy special candles for them, or use regular white tapers, or even get menorot (plural -- I know just enough Hebrew that writing "menorahs" hurts my soul) that light with low-wattage light bulbs or LEDs. Municipalities in the US with a substantial Jewish population -- like Boston and New York City -- often have one up in public somewhere. There's been a big one set up in Copley Square for as long as I've been here, although the green across from the library where it usually goes is under construction right now, so I don't know where it is this year.

I apologize for the lack of traditional Hanukkah gear in the illustration today. I tried to get something usable out of the AI image generator, but it has no idea what a dreidel looks like (its best attempts would have made better D&D dice) and all the menorot it gave me had either five candles or like thirteen. That's an accurate reflection of how well the rats can count, I suppose, but not really what I wanted. Please enjoy what I finally wrangled out of it on my fifth attempt, which is a rat eating a chocolate coin. I did ask some Jewish friends if it would be disrespectful to feed the rats gelt, and the consensus was "only if you don't get pictures", so I promise you all that I will get some of that fuzzy spoiled ratto goodness up on Instagram as soon as possible.