Hanukkah Mom

And so my life as a cultural ambassador begins: I was asked (actually, Drew was asked) to invite me to give a talk about HANUKKAH to the kids at St. James. Yes, it's a Lutheran church but a lot of non-observant Christians go there and I was very surprised to hear that Rachel is the only Jewish kid in her whole preschool. So guess who gets to try to convince all the children that Hanukkah is really a better deal than Christmas because you get EIGHT presents instead of one, and you don't have to listen to Daddy curse as he trips over the Christmas lights, and eating ham is a lot more boring than sufganyot and latkes??

I plan to head to a craft store and make a big menorah out of construction paper, complete with candles that the kids can "light" just before they head home for the night. And you bet I'm going to play up the Maccabees' victory (which all the warrior kids will love) and ply everyone with jelly donuts (homemade, if I can manage it) and teach them the dreidel song, plus the song in Yiddish than Mom and Dad taught us when we were kids...Rachel can almost sing it by herself! A 3 1/2 year old learning Yiddish! In America! Oy vey!

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Tonight Rachel said that she and Andrew, a kid in her class, were playing "werewolves" in school today, and that they tried to scare all the other kids.

"We were running around and getting lots of exercise," she said. "He was a boy one and I was a girl one."

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One of the reasons I'm glad to be teaching the kids Hanukkah songs is that Rachel has already started memorizing Christmas songs. Nothing with Little Lord Jesus, thank God, but enough mentioning Christmas that I can't help wincing (in fairness, she asks me to sing her the Yiddish Hanukkah song almost every night).

It's also my fault that I play albums like "A Charlie Brown Christmas" and some other Christmas-themed albums because, let's face it, there aren't any decent Hanukkah albums out there (I'm hoping Paul McCartney's recent marriage to a Jewish socialite will change that; he supposedly is converting to Judaism next year). Anyway, Rachel listened to a verison of "Do you hear what I hear?" and instead of "a child, a child/shivers in the cold/we will bring him silver and gold," she substituted, "the bumblebees, the bumblebees/we will bring them pollen/we will bring them pollen," which I thought was completely adorable.

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She was so sweet tonight; as we cuddled in her bed together, she reached over to me, just like I do to her, and swiped my nose gently with her index finger, then kissed me softly on my cheek and lips. And just before she fell asleep, she kept patting my cheeks with her little hand.

Yes, it's true: I'm in love.