Schober-Levine Family Channukha!

Earlier, my folks came down to celebrate Channukha with Ruth, along with Uncle David and Meli. The hit of the visit (Day 952) was, of course, icing/sprinkling cookies with Grammy, and then licking the bowl.

From 21st Century Digital Kid

From 21st Century Digital Kid

From 21st Century Digital Kid

Day 669 - Milton's Satan, Darth Vader, Dracula, etc.

One of Melissa's coworkers got Ruth a board book about Chanukah for the holidays, and she really likes us to read it to her (she's really into the Passover book our friend Joe got her too... weird kid). Anyway, as a result, I was treated to this exchange this morning as I came downstairs:

Melissa (reading): Suddenly, wicked King Antiochus of Syria sent soldiers to enslave the Jews and turn their Temple into a place of idols, impure animals, and sin.

Ruth: I LIKE SIN TOO!

Clearly, we are doing something wrong.

Eight Crazy Nights

Day 249 - And the oil totally burned for eight days. No joke. No, this isn't "Jewish Christmas."

Tonight was the first night of Chanukkha (I can never spell it either). We used the menorah that my mom bought for me when I was a kid (and she worked at the shul... I think she was probably their only gentile employee... wait, did I tell this story already last year? Has this blog been going on for over a year?), and To Be a Jew, the same "I'm not an observant Jew and need to look up the prayers every time" book that my dad always used. Tradition is good, even if we're technically celebrating the victory of terrorist religious fundamentalists over cosmopolitans (assimilationist cosmopolitans, though!).

M and I will be heading up to my aunt Connie and Sharon's on Christmas Day this year. Christmas Eve I'll be making the newly-traditional Schober-Levine Christmas goose (with fried potatoes and red cabbage with raisins, yum!). It's nice to have a little thing that we do with just our little family.

Family can be difficult. I'm certainly not the easiest son to have - I can be self-absorbed at the best of times (remind me to tell you about the Jamesway Father's Day Card contest some time, an occasion on which I acquitted myself particularly shamefully), and it's easy to annoy me (and I have difficulty hiding when I'm annoyed - that's why Ruth is the peacemaker in training, not me). So, despite the fact that my folks and I generally have nothing against each other, we can tend to make each other tense. I love them anyway, and appreciate all they do for us, even if we all have very definite ideas about things that rarely mesh.

Trying to remain connected to family and tradition can be tough. When I was a kid, every year, we'd all pack into my dad's Ford Econoline van (with the racing stripes my brother and I installed one summer) and drive 4-5 hours up to Western MA to see my grandparents. Things have drifted since then... my brother and I live farther away and have things of our own to attend to, my grandmother can't travel very easily, my grandfather died a few years back (7 actually... wow), and things just... drift. This year, we'd hoped to travel up to Boston to see M's folks, but with their work and M's work and everything it didn't work out. And it reminds us how easy it is to go eight months, and how much Ruth has grown in that time. Unfortunately, M's grandmother has only ever met Ruth once, and only for a few minutes, and hasn't gotten to the library to read this blog. We took the trek out to see my grandmother in CA over the summer, and we hope that won't be the only time she gets to meet Ruth, either.

Family can be difficult. I guess you do your best and hope for relatively few regrets, and that your daughter eventually has a child to whom she can explain her ambivalent relationship to that oil menorah.

Oh, and I've been listening to Erran Baron Cohen's Songs in the Key of Hannukha, which is surprisingly good (worth it just for the Ladino songs).

Ruth's Zeroeth Channukha!

Tonight is the first night of the festival of lights, which celebrates the victory of religious fascism over cosmopolitanism, or something like that. We hope to bring Ruth up to appreciate fully the great history of her people - to that end, I have made sure that we have two essential Judaism manuals around the house:



For me, To Be a Jew was the central devotional element of the holidays when I was a child. The Jewish side of my family was never very observant (and after I opted not to be Bar Mitzvah, I wasn't really welcomed by the local rabbis - my other grandparents' priest was much more interested in talking to me about theology... I just never found Catholic theology all that agreeable, but I give them points for being relatively welcoming), so holidays meant sitting down with my family so that my dad could flip back and forth through To Be a Jew and we could all stumble over the Hebrew transliterations. It was only later in life that I started telling everyone foolish enough to ask that Hannukha celebrated a terrorist victory. My folks had a lot to put up with. Thanks, Mom and Dad.

Oh, and yes, that is a bad-ass oil-burning menorah. I fell in love with it at the synagogue gift shop when I was a kid. It went missing sometime around when my family moved from my old hometown back in 1992, and my mom (miraculously?) found it just in time for our first Channukah in the new house and our first "with" Ruth.