Happy Hannukah - Expat Holidays

Yesterday was the first day of Hannukah. It is, by far, my preferred Jewish holiday. Well, how can you not like a holiday that demands you eat doughnuts for eight days? True, by the end of it we all look somewhat like a doughnut - rounder around the middle and full of jam - but it's more than that. Contrary to what people outside of Israel think, Hannukah isn't really one of the biggest or most important holidays for Jewish people. In fact, it is one of those tiny niche holidays reserved solely for children, I mean you don't even get days off work for it! But Hannukah has been my favourite holiday for many years, so I make a very big effort to celebrate it even now, after we've lost so many of our other holidays.

I've talked to so many immigrants over these last four years and they all said the same thing - celebrating a holiday that does not belong to the country you live in is hard, in fact sometimes it feels almost impossible. You never give it any thought when you're in your home-country, but so much of celebrating a holiday is about family and togetherness and the community - the feel in the air that washes over everything before a holiday arrives. Maybe it's part of the reason we like Christmas so much - that need to belong, to be able to feel that holiday spirit once more. When we left Israel, it was just after Hannukah of 2009, and to be honest we revelled in the freedom of not having to celebrate anything belonging to any location or religion. With all my love for holidays, big gatherings have never been my thing, holidays in Israel make me into a bundle of nerves and I guess we needed to rebel a little bit.
Though that rebellion was short lived, it did teach me something. Living so far away gives you options. You can get rid of everything you don't like or don't approve of. There is something about that distance from everything you knew that makes you examine your life in a different way. A way that actually strips it all down to the basics - what in the traditions you grew up on is really important to you? What do you want your children to know? You can pick and choose. That's the good part. The bad part is that after you picked, then comes the reality of just how hard it is to actually celebrate what you chose. I guess that is why a lot of people choose to live in closed communities, or send their children to religious schools - to give them more of the tradition than we can, to give them more of that sense of community, of belongingness than we can do here. We are not religious people, nor are we really the community types, so we live here, where you don't hear Hebrew on the streets, and there's nowhere to buy good Hummus. But it does mean that we can't give our children a "real holiday" like it's traditionally done,
but then again do we really want to?

Over the last four years we picked and we chose and we made an eclectic list of holidays and traditions that more than anything else, makes us happy (one of the main conditions to being on that list is having a food. A holiday with no food is not a real holiday in my book). And at the very top of that list is Hannukah, because it's in the middle of winter, when you really need a reason to celebrate, because it has such great food, because it's a children's holiday. Just like Christmas I guess, it gets a whole new meaning and dimension when you have children. As an adult it feels somewhat idiotic to light a few candles and sing some songs no one understands. With children, oh with children it lights up the whole house - you have three menorahs, dreidels, doughnuts, latkes, music, laughter. With children it's a real celebration.

But the real reason it's my favourite holiday is because it has a story, a moral if you want, that resonates with me. Mainly because I'm into big-important-sappy morals, but also because it really is the way we try to raise our children. And so I love Hannukah because I love telling them the stories and meaning the holiday has for me - it's not the traditional way, nor is it what you hear in Israel, because for me Hannukah is far more than the story about who tried to kill the Jews this time. When you get down to the basics, it's not about Jews or any other specific religion, it's about the belief that you fight for what's right. It's about not standing on the sidelines when there's an injustice. It's about the fact that one tiny candle can light up the entire darkness. And most of all it's about the freedom to be who you are and believe in whatever you choose.

I choose to celebrate Hannukah with as much resemblance to the way it's done in Israel. Some of it is my wish to keep some of my tradition alive and build a connection with my children that will be lost otherwise, and some of it I guess is a  defiance against the Christmasing of Hannukah - we don't have a Hannukah bush, we don't give eight presents (or any presents for that matter. We go with the traditional chocolate coins), we don't have Hannukah cookies houses, or any other Christmas elements in our Hannukah. Because we save all that for Christmas.

For me, holidays are always more secular than religious, they are more the meaning you give them than the traditional one, they are more about connections and family and belonging, and more than anything else - they are about love and laughter. 

And there is no better way to get all that than with a doughnut and candles. 

Happy Hannukah everyone!