Chanukah is only a few days away, and I am a wannabe Jew without a menorah. I am also living in Small Town, Arkansas, in the middle of a pandemic, and I have no idea how to go about celebrating Chanukah anyway. But just about every culture has a winter solstice tradition to stave off the darkness, and for me, it’s the tradition itself that does that.
Growing up, I felt rootless, floating in the miasma of Americana without anything to really call my own. I lamented that my father’s mother had never taught her children German, or my mother’s father, Lithuanian. I even have several poems to that effect. One of my fellow poets and good friend, Noelia Cerna, had the perfect term for it: cultural orphans.
This is, in fact, one of the reasons I was drawn to Judaism. Mulling it over for the last year, I grappled with whether or not I only wanted to convert because I thought adoption into Jewish culture would fill a hole inside me. I had tried to fill it by reconnecting to my Lithuanian heritage, but that had only done so much. Because I wanted tradition–something I could pass down to my children. It took my dad’s death nine months ago to make me realize my family did have traditions, many of which he was an integral part.
Growing up, he was the Easter bunny. Even in high school, he would ask if I wanted to hunt for eggs, and I always said yes. By my senior year, I knew all his favorite hiding places, many of which were cleverly out in the open–window sills, the tops of picture frames, and carefully balanced on the handles of kitchen drawers. On every gift-giving occasion, he would draw silly cartoons of the family–including the dogs and cats–in the card. When we lived in New Mexico, dad was also the one who took us to chop down a Christmas tree and decorate it with chile lights. Yes, New Mexicans are so obsessed with chiles that we even have chile-shaped Christmas lights. But even chile lights do not compare to luminarias.
In case you don’t know, a luminaria is basically a votive candle in a paper bag. If this sounds like a bad idea, let me reassure you–you weigh the bag down with sand, so even in a worse case scenario, only the bag catches fire. I’ve seen it first hand. Every year in college, I helped decorate the UNM campus with luminarias for a veritable festival of lights. There are no Christmas lights more beautiful. I know the Fayetteville square looks lovely this time of year, but it doesn’t compare to the old Spanish mission in Albuquerque when it’s lit by hundreds of luminarias… my dad was the one who took us.
I think the love of tradition was something special he and I shared. My brother certainly doesn’t have it. Christmas traditions for him consisted of hiding under a sleeping bag so my mom couldn’t take his picture. But I put out luminarias every year–my own little piece of New Mexico. And in April, when a small group of vaccinated friends gathered for Easter at my house, I hid eggs for my friend’s five year old daughter–in all my dad’s favorite places.
Now, we’re approaching our first December without dad. Mom met with my brother and they decided they didn’t want to do anything for Christmas. I think it’s too painful for her, and like I said, my brother was never big on holidays anyway. She was worried I would be upset about the decision when she remembered that I had recently decided to convert to Judaism, so Christmas… not really my thing anymore.
But with Chanukah around the corner, I’m starting to think for the first time about what I’m giving up. A lot of Christmas traditions I don’t care about–I don’t need the tree or the presents, and if I really want chile lights, I can hang those up any time. But I had always assumed that I would one day take up my mom’s mantle of sewing personalized stockings for the family. Just as I had assumed I would carry on my dad’s tradition of hiding Easter Eggs. But these are not Jewish holidays. Of course, there’s nothing inherently Christian about the traditions themselves, and I find myself ruminating on how I might find a way to merge the new with the old.
More pressing is this: Chanukah is only a few days away, and I am a wannabe Jew without a menorah. I am living in Small Town, Arkansas during a pandemic, and I have no idea where to get one. But I do have a bin full of sand. And a drawer with paper bags. And a box of candles. And my front porch fits eight luminarias perfectly. I don’t know what will become of the stockings and the Easter eggs, but when it comes to staving off the winter darkness, I already have a way to merge old traditions with new ones. So I guess now, I’m a wannabe Jew with a menorah. And I still have the best lights on the block.
