Tonight will mark the third night of “Shiksa Hanukkah,” made ever the more shiksa by its coinciding this year with Christmas Eve. Since I’ve always had a thing for Jewish men (witness #Bernie2020 lol), I was destined to be a shiksa. According to the Urban Dictionary definition below, I am the “ideal shiksa…a blonde WASP who looks the opposite of a stereotypical Jew.” I learned the term in college when I travelled to the upper east side to meet my first boyfriend’s grandparents. At the larger family gathering grandpa pulled my bf aside to whisper some sage advice, “shiksas are for practice” came first. The even more daunty, “scratch a shiksa and you’ll find an antisemite,” was to follow.
A few years later, I met and married my husband. Although his mother was very culturally Jewish (which btw makes my husband a Jew under Talmudic law–this is the kind of thing one comes to know as a shiksa), like many American Jews, she was not religiously observant. As a result, her son/my husband grew up with only a passing familiarity and observance of Hanukkah in the winter and Passover in the spring (and almost none of the highest holy days of Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah in the fall).
Like mothers and aspiring clergy everywhere I appointed myself in charge of my children’s spiritual upbringing and determined to raise them with an understanding not only of their WASP (mostly Scottish) heritage but also their eastern European Jewish roots. Hence over the years, I developed what I like to call, “the Shiksa Hanukkah.”
To celebrate Hanukkah shiksa-style, the responsible shiksa will need the following tools and practices:
- Look up the Hanukkah dates every year and at least by the second day of the eight day holiday begin to set up the stuff below.
- Buried somewhere under multiple large unwieldy boxes of christmas ornaments, lights and keepsakes there will be a small cardboard box once marked “Alanon” crossed out and replaced with the word “Hanukkah.”
- In this box there will be
- one improperly cleaned or stored menorah with bits of wax leftover from previous year.
- a handful of candles leftover from the previous year that actually fit in that menorah
- several boxes of candles from previous years that have been determined to NOT fit in that menorah yet are inexplicably stored and retrieved annually
- two blue and white hacky sack balls and one blue and white beanie baby bear each with a Star of David on them
- several different dreidels:
- one large artistic one that makes better art than dreidel
- one large plastic one that used to play Dreidel Dreidel Dreidel I made it out of clay and has long since run out of battery–for years no one in the household has energy or wherewithal to remove the 4 tiny screws and see if batteries can be replaced–this spins pretty well for how large it is.
- one cheap small plastic one that is the only one really fit to play dreidel with (this is essential to have on hand even when there are no children around to play it)
- Also must retrieve a blue and white tablecloth and napkins wrinkled and poorly folded at the bottom of a heavy plastic tub (awkwardly balanced on the top shelf of the downstairs closet) under 25 equally poorly stored red and green tablecloths, placemats, napkins and dish towels.
- Helps to have a daughter with facility for languages who dropped out of Hebrew school after 2 months at age eight when she found out that there was a religion associated with it. She sort of has the Hanukkah prayer memorized.
- For the eight days of the holiday, about 5 days out of 8 if you’re honest, you put the proper of candles out at the beginning of the day. And, in the unlikely event you have a meal at home together that week, light them in the evening meal with daughter hastily and reluctantly muttering the prayer.
- It goes without saying that the Shiksa Hanukkah display awkwardly competes with the much larger Christmas festival sprawled all over the house. Particularly since I have a bit of a Crêche (nativity scene) fetish (which should be a subject of another post, I can’t believe it isn’t)
This morning’s actual Hanukkah display
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| Compare that with this morning’s actual magical Christmas eve display |