Hanukkah 2023

[canyonwalker]

The past several years we've been marking the holiday of Hanukkah in our household. It's the Jewish holiday of the Festival of Lights. Hanukkah started on Thursday evening at sundown this year. I've been busy late this week so it's taken me a couple days to catch up with it on my blog.



Hanukkah spans 8 days, starting at sundown each day. Each day is marked with the lighting of an additional candle while a short blessing is said. The candles are arranged on a menorah (Hebrew word for candelabra) that can hold 9 candles. The ninth candle is a striker that's used to light the others.

If you want to know more about Hanukkah, from why it's the Festival of Lights to why there are different spellings of Hanukkah, read my blog Five Things about Hanukkah from a year ago. As for what's the deal with this menorah.... It's decorated with a pattern of mahjong tiles. It's an in-joke Hawk found amusing about how old Jewish women stereotypically love to play the Chinese game of mahjong.

Comments

[some_other_dave]

But those are American Mahjong tiles! Chinese Mahjong doesn't have Joker tiles... We know this because we play with some of the old Jewish women that are our neighbors.

[canyonwalker]

Yeah, it's decorated in the style of American mahjong tiles. There aren't exactly a lot of mahjong menorahs out there (we've only ever seen one) so we take what we can get. Our actual mahjong set is Chinese.

[merhawk]

And yet I bought it from a place in China. 😏

[merhawk]

It was an I joke that I really like mahjong!