How to Spell Chanukah...And Other Holiday Dilemmas Read Online Free PDF Page B

competition in general, c) extremely stoned, or d) all of the above.
    We are incapable of taking the game seriously, which frustrates our furrowed-browed, adorably Type A opponents to no end. While they huddle together and strategize, we gleefully sing rounds of “Light one candle for the Maccabee soldiers, with thanks that their light didn’t die! Light one candle for the pain they endured when their right to exist was denied!” We lose track of whose turn it is. We shout out answers to other teams’ questions, trying to be helpful and sportsmanlike. And, eventually, we legitimately win the game. This is infuriating to the losers, whose losing is almost enough to incite the kind of existential crisis usually sparked by fatal botched diagnoses in residency. They’ve lost Cranium to a bunch of stoners ?!
    â€œGood game. Congratulations,” they say tightly.
    By then it’s about eleven fifty-five, so we head out to the street with noisemakers and pots and pans, looking out over the city and the Space Needle, where fireworks will signify the end of the year.
    Unbeknownst to us, the fifteen-year-old has been drinking champagne all night, and he starts vomiting his brains out (not literally) pretty soon after we welcome the New Year.
    Once again we’ve forgotten the candles.
    VIII.
    We almost forget all about the eighth and final night, too.
    When we finally do remember, just before bed, we load up the whole menorah together, no debate tonight about where the candles go. We set it in the window, the rest of the house dark and quiet. It is the first day of 2006 and tomorrow we’ll all go back to our lives: Sarah to three months of internal medicine rotation in the middle of Idaho, Jackie and I to Chelsea and Brooklyn, respectively. It’s going to be a big year for each of us: lots of changes and miracles and stepping-stones and new challenges we vaguely know are on their way. And who knows when we’ll all be together again?
    I am nominated to hold the shamash , which I find I’m excited to do, like when I was little and it felt like a great honor. I light the candles from left to right, starting with the newest and lighting one for each of the past seven nights as I go.
    First is tonight’s, eight, with my girls beside me and the sound of Seattle rain gently pelting the window under our three tone-deaf, exhausted voices. Then last night’s, seven, and the collective ruckus we made banging our pots and pans to usher in a new year while fireworks exploded over the city. Six, Shabbos blunts and porno-cakes. Five at Sleater-Kinney. Four as token, pseudomissionary Jews in a roomful of well-intentioned holiday whores. Three at the Havurah party. Two alone at the movies. And by the time I make it to the last candle, the first night, Christmas, my uniquely fraught family and my uniquely fraught place in (or out of) it, I’m almost able to own even that. It’s been a good week, it’s a new year now, after all, and the whole menorah is glowing, full, finally complete.
    Jackie and Sarah and I stand looking for a moment at the blazing menorah and its reflection in the window. Above it our faces are reflected, too. We linger for a moment and then we turn away, off into a new week, a new year, and a blessedly blank slate.

STEVE ALMOND
    Chanukah Your Hearts Out!
    A sermonette on the proper role of the holiday in the lives of modern atheist Jews
    . . . I SPEAK NOW TO THOSE OF YOU WHO GREW UP IN THE HAZE OF MODERN SECULAR LIFE, WHO, LIKE ME, DERIVE FROM THE SHTETLS OF THE PALE STEPPES, FROM L UBLIN AND M INSK, FROM BEARDED MEN WHO SPENT HOURS IN COLD STONE HALLS HUNCHED OVER LAW, WHO FOUND IN G OD AND H IS IRASCIBLE TINKERING THE SUBJECT OF AN ENTIRE LIFE, AND NEVER ONCE QUESTIONED THE W ORD.
    I speak to you, the children and grandchildren and great- grandchildren of these men, who have known no other life but suburban America with its bright avenues and TV shows and bubble gum,