How I Saved Hanukkah (2 page)

“Guess who came to school?” Ned said, grabbing at the ends of my long hair. “Guess!”

“Santa Claus,” I said.

First Ned’s face caved in, disappointed that I had guessed. Then he looked at me with awe, because I was so brilliant.

“I went to the same preschool, Neddy. Santa comes every year,” I said.

“Oh.” Ned thought about that, then perked up. “Guess what he gave me!”

I did not say, “A candy cane.” That would have been mean.

“A CANDY CANE!” Ned said. He fished around in his grimy pocket with his grubby hand and pulled out a half-eaten, entirely slimed, candy cane. “Want some?” he offered.

A fabulous sister might have pretended to take a lick and made extravagant yum-yum sounds. Instead I reached into my backpack and pulled out my blue-and-white tube sword.

“Happy Hanukkah,” I said. “Ho ho ho.” No one
on earth would be excited by that crumpled scrap—except Ned. It must be nice to be three.

*    *    *

Ned jumped around, jabbing me with his wrinkled sword while I put on my Rollerblades. It occurred to me that he moved more like a tree frog than like any kind of mammal. I told him I’d be back before dinner, but still he watched me leave as if I was going off to war, on the moon.

Rollerblading is the best feeling in the world. It is like sliding on a really smooth wood floor in socks, except better, because you go and go and you’re outside. My arms love it, my face loves it, even my hair loves it. And it’s hilly in California where I live, with lots of glorious downhills to fly.

I’d had a great pre-dinner ride and was racing back home in the near-dark when Christmas lights started coming on at every house but ours. Lucy likes the pure white lights best, but I think the all-different-colored ones are perfect.

When I asked why we can’t have Christmas lights, my mom said, “Because we’re Jewish.”

“What’s that got to do with it?” I’d asked. “They
don’t make you prove you’re Christian at the store when you try to buy lights.”

As I zipped toward home, I thought about the Christmas lights. They reminded me again about being singled out at school. Here it was the first night of Hanukkah, but you’d never know it was anything special looking at my house. As I got closer, I saw how boring and sad it looked—the plain, dull frump at a ball full of dazzling princesses. I knew exactly how it must feel.

2

T
his Hanukkah promised to be like all our other ones, only worse, because this time my dad wasn’t going to be home.

My dad is a segment producer for a TV show, which means he makes pieces of the show, not the whole thing. They call his kind of show a “news magazine.” There are three or four segments for each show: Maybe one on some extra-nasty crime or some wacky cult, then one about an amazingly brave person with an icky disease, or some evil threat to the environment, and last, a “warm-fuzzy-feel-good segment,” as my dad calls them, “to calm everyone down enough to go to sleep.”

Dad has been in the warm-fuzzy department a lot lately. The story he has been working on is about the sextuplets in Washington, D.C. That’s six babies who were born at once, out of one human mother.

“That poor, poor woman,” Mom had said, way back when my dad first started filming the sextuplets. Since then Dad has flown to Washington to produce one sextuplet segment after another, and we are all sick to death of them.

In the beginning he’d said the sextuplets looked like a bunch of pink raisins, and they sort of gave him the willies. Now he says they have “individual personalities” and HE can tell them all apart.

“The network feels that if I stick Santa hats on all six heads, it will be a holiday hit,” my dad had said yesterday. “So I’m taking the red-eye back to Washington tonight.”

“Cookie has red eyes,” Ned said. That’s the pet white rat at his preschool.

“I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Cookie had the seat next to me!” Dad said. “I often sit next to rats who snore. Or worse, rats who wake me up to tell me
I
snore.” My dad thinks he’s hilarious.

“Daddy’s just kidding,” Mom said, shooting Dad one of her looks.

So my dad told Ned that it’s called a red-eye flight because you get so tired being on an airplane all night that you get red eyes.

“You’ll see,” he said, “when I get home.”

When we got up this morning, my dad was gone.

*    *    *

Anyway, it was the first night of Hanukkah, so my mom got out the menorah (that’s the Hanukkah candle holder). I lit the shammes (that’s the candle that you light all the other candles with). Then I handed the shammes to Ned, who nearly roasted himself and dripped wax everywhere while somehow managing to get his candle lit.

My mom and I sang the song we always sing when we light the candles, and Ned barked along.

“We don’t dance the hora,” I said. “Why does the song say we dance the hora?”

“Because it rhymes with ‘MENORAH’!” my mom said. “Should it say we’ll go to the store-ah? Sit on the floor-ah? Invite cousin Laura? What if some Jew somewhere doesn’t have a cousin Laura?”

I knew that the fastest way to get through the whole stupid thing was to not ask any more questions, but one slipped out. “So which ‘days long ago’ are we supposed to be reminded of anyway?”

“It’s that war between King Whatshisname and the Maccabees,” my mom said, shoving her slippery brown hair behind her ears, like she does.

Ned and I didn’t know what she was talking about, so she told us the Hanukkah story. Mom’s version:

“Two thousand years ago the Jews were minding their own business, going to Temple to worship their one God. Everyone else at the time was into multiple gods and idols and whatnot.

“Anyway, the bad guy, King . . . Antiochus, came along and said, ‘From now on it is against the law to be Jewish, and anyone who observes any Jewish tradition will be punished as a criminal, taken as a slave, beaten
up, and killed. And if you don’t put Christmas lights on your Temple, then I am going to huff and puff and blow it down!’”

“MOM!” I said. “There were no Christmas lights two thousand years ago. They didn’t even have electricity!”

“Well, if you want to get picky about it,” my mom said, “there were no Christians or Christmas yet either. But that’s not the point.

“A Jewish family called the Maccabees,” my mom went on, “said, ‘Not by the hair of our chinny-chin-chins!’ So the king’s soldiers blew the Temple down. Then they did the rest of the usual rotten war stuff.”

Ned started making machine-guns sounds.

“Guns hadn’t been invented yet, sorry,” my mom told him. “Maybe swords or slingshots or something.”

Ned’s gun noises made me think of my dad. If he were here, he would probably put in antiaircraft missiles and sound effects like explosions and dying groans. That’s what he does with the Civil War.

Ned thinks that stuff is a hoot. I think both my parents are bizarre.

My mom pushed her hair back and said, “The
Maccabees fought using sticks and stones and stuff. They were just a tiny band of Jews against the king’s powerful army. Miracle number one: The Jews won.

“Then they fixed up the Temple. They wanted to relight their lamp to celebrate, but the bad guys had spilled the sacred oil with all their huffing and puffing. There was only enough oil left to last one measly night.

“Miracle number two—like when my gas gauge is on empty and yet we make it to the gas station: The oil burned for eight nights instead of just one. The end.”

I suspected that Jewish people the world over were listening to this story told differently. Less huffing and puffing, for one thing. My fault, I was the one who had asked her.

My mom handed Ned and me each a bag from the grocery store and said, “Sorry, I didn’t get a chance to wrap them.”

In Ned’s bag was a pair of socks that he immediately put on his hands and used as boxing gloves—happy as a clam.

In my bag were six rolls of Scotch tape. When I did not act happy as another clam, my mom explained, “So you’ll stop using mine all the time.”

“Gee, you shouldn’t have,” I said to make her feel guilty, but it didn’t work.

My mom just shrugged and said, “You’re welcome.”

*    *    *

My overnight bag was packed. I was going to sleep over at Lucy’s. She and I had something special planned, something secret, and this Hanukkah business had already taken up a lot of time.

“We’re supposed to let the candles melt,” my mom said, “but you can’t walk to Lucy’s in the dark and I can’t leave them burning while I drive you.” She was about to blow them out when I stopped her.

I don’t know why I didn’t want her to do that—I just didn’t. “If we can’t have Christmas because we are so Jewish,” I said, “then let’s at least be Jewish!”

“We are Jewish no matter what, Marla,” my mom said, but we waited. It didn’t take long for the candles to melt and they looked kind of nice, though not compared to how Lucy’s house looked when we pulled in her driveway. Her dad had hung lights
everywhere.

*    *    *

I love going to Lucy’s house. It is totally different than mine. All the furniture is dark and there are no baby
toys around. Her two big sisters have makeup and other teenage stuff in the bathroom. Their dad doesn’t have much in the way of knickknacks, but their mom collects everything—teacups, thimbles, little cat statues displayed in glass cases like a museum. Lucy’s grandma lives there too and has old clocks that make noise. Three or four of them chimed just as I walked in.

“Hi!” Lucy said, then whispered, “Ready for the you-know-what?”

“The moon is full,” I whispered in return.

We needed a private spot for our séance. A spot where no one would know that we had matches.

We took that blue-and-white candle I’d made at school, and some matches from Lucy’s dad’s desk, up to Lucy’s room, but Kate was there, in one of her porcupine moods. It’s supposed to be half Lucy’s room, but it isn’t really, at least not when Kate is like that. We tried her oldest sister Yaz’s room, but we couldn’t go in there either because she was on the phone with the door closed. And we aren’t allowed in Lucy’s parents’ room or her grandma’s—ever.

Downstairs Lucy’s father was reading the paper in the living room and her grandma was watching TV in the den.

“I’ll bet you a million bucks your mom’s in the kitchen,” I said. “Why is she always in there anyway? My mom’s never in the kitchen.”

“I think she’s under a spell,” Lucy said, “doing dishes for eternity.”

We looked in the kitchen, and sure enough, there was Mrs. Doyle with her dish towel, humming along with the Christmas carols on the radio. Lucy and I both started laughing.

“What’s so funny?” Lucy’s mom smiled, ready to laugh with us.

So we bolted from the kitchen into the tiny bathroom next to the pantry. I was laughing so hard, I had to pee.

We locked the bathroom door, and lit the blue-and-white candle. It’s a good thing that Lucy had insisted on keeping that candle when I wanted to throw it out, because it was just right for a séance.

We turned off the light. In the dark with the candle between us on the floor, I instantly started feeling spooked. My arm hairs tingled. My toes curled in my sandals.