Hanukkah is Gonna Be All Right

A lot of my blogging this December is going to fall into three categories: embedding gratuitously entertaining Hanukkah videos, linking you to Hanukkah resources, and promoting the blogs of our writers. This post does all three.

First, I think everyone should read Amy Meltzer’s blog Homeshuling (and that I should get more writing from her on our site!) Whether or not you are in an interfaith family, if you’re parenting Jewish children in a majority non-Jewish environment you will relate to her post Playing Christians. (Sometimes when I read these blogs I come down with blog envy–I wish people had written their posts for IFF instead. That happens to me a lot when I read Fifty Percenters, a new blog by people in interfaith couples and families.)

Aliza Hausman, one of my favorite IFF writers and author of the insightful Memoirs of a Jewminicana, asked on her Facebook page yesterday whether anyone had good songs for non-Jewish children to learn about Hanukkah. It turns out it’s for a friend of hers who is a pre-school teacher, but I thought it would be relevant to a lot of our readers.  I thought immediately of “I Had a Little Dreidel,” (MP3) the quintessential non-religious Hanukkah song in English. (The link is to a cool acapella group from Chicago, Listen Up! Acapella.)

In recent years, my favorite non-religious English song about Hanukkah has been Woody Guthrie’s Hanuka Dance. (The link there is to a Youtube video of a very earnest young man covering the song–it’s sweet!) Subsequent to my discovery of the Woody Guthrie recording of that song, one of my favorite bands of all time, The Klezmatics, covered Woody Guthrie’s Hanukkah songs in an album, Happy Joyous Hanukkah. (I wrote this post yesterday and actually heard the title song being piped over the loudspeaker in my local supermarket! Now that’s weird.)

You’re going to think this is bizarre, but I’m embedding a video that makes me cry. The Leevees, a bunch of indie rock musicians who do Hanukkah music, sang “Latke Clan,” at a synagogue nursery school. It’s dark, it’s December, it looks cold and grey, all the parents are hugging their kids, and the band is singing, “everyone’s together tonight.” I don’t know, it’s a happy, silly song and everyone’s happy and making jokes. I’m just touched because this is really how it is–we like to all be together. Hope that’s how it is for you. (Next Hanukkah post–pancakes!)

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