HO HO OY!

For the first time in over 40 years Christmas Day and first day of Channukah coincided this past year. Unfortunately, it sent the wrong message to some of the non-Jews in thinking that Channukah is a major Jewish holiday. So let me clarify once and for all:

Channukah is NOT an important Jewish holiday!!!
Rosh Hashanna, Yom Kippur, and Passover are important Jewish holidays!

We spent Christmas with my family-in-law (which probably deserves an entire blog right there). In the spirit of the holiday I decided to spend some considerable time teaching my husband's nephews and nieces (oh, about 10 of them under the age of 6) about Channukah. So I bought books for kids, Channukah candles, dreydles, paint, clay, CD's, latkes and cookies materials.

We spent Christmas Eve looking for drift wood on the sandy shores of Virginia Beach, so we can build our own Channukiyah with it. We ended up collecting a hundred seashells instead. The original plan was to use the 36 bottle caps I've been collecting for a week to paste into a piece of wood (nine per piece of wood, for each kid that was going to be there Christmas Eve). The final execution involved four Channukiyot with bottle caps and three with seashells. And one heck of an exhausted Jew, trying to maintain calm and patience with three five year olds, one three year old and one toddler who decided to learn how to walk right where we were trying to paint the wood.

Thankfully, no serious damage was done, and our artistic attempts came out pretty satisfactory considering the ages of the kids. Then came the extended family. Right on time to make the dreydels out of clay.

I had no idea how difficult it is to teach kids to create a cube from clay until that day. Next time, I'll skip a few steps, and just give them something to paint on the finished product. But then again maybe next time they'll grow up a year older and will be more capable?

Somewhere inside me I'm thinking maybe I'm not fit to be a parent just yet.

Which is just fine because neither is my husband. We took our three-year-old godson (my husband's nephew) to get a haircut and shop for ingredients for my Channukah dinner. We gave up on the haircut when it turned out to be 1.5 hours to wait. So we went shopping instead. Then on the way home, my husband tried to be a role model to his nephew and runs a red light. When the police pulled us over, our godson kept asking, "Why did the police stop us?...What did we do wrong?" I think the policeman took pity on us when he heard all those questions. We got off with a verbal warning. Thank dog for little kids who aren't ours!

Chrismukah itself was just great. My attempts to teach the kids about Channukah immediately after opening Christmas presents was as successful as one would expect considering the confusion we've put these poor kids into. We finished eating the traditional Christmas dinner and went straight to the Channukah lighting of the Menorah (which is really called Channukiya!) and the eating of the latkes and cookies. By the end of all this, everyone was educated enough about Jesus playing dreydel on Christmas and the miracle of the oil that Jesus celebrates to this day. Santa makes Channukiyot for little kids and Antiochus is just a name that's difficult to pronounce if you're older than six.

A great time was had by all. Can't wait for next year's Chrismukah celebration.