The Choosing: A Rabbi's Journey from Silent Nights to High Holy Days

6. Chanukah

6 Chanukah Miller Light The House of Shammai maintain: On the first day eight lights are lit and thereafter they are gradually reduced; but the House of Hillel say: On the first day one is lit and thereafter they are progressively increased. . . . The House of Hillel’s reason is that we increase in [matters of] sanctity but do not reduce. —Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 21b w The scent of singed cat made an appearance in our home the night the Christmas tree went up. The ornaments were placed carefully on the tree, and my father’s favorite music, the Christmas collection of the Germanic boysinger Heintje, was set on a loop to play through the night. My father’s penchant for Teutonic music was given free rein over the holidays. We all quietly thanked God that Abba never made a Christmas album. Because my parents bought their tree late in the season to save money, there were two basic models left to choose from. There was the supermodel tree, which looked emaciated and dropped its needles as if it had just come off a bulimic bender at Fashion Week. Then, there was the sizequeen tree, a more frequent choice. This beast of a tree took up half the living room. Whatever the shape, the scent was the same. The tree made the whole living room smell like 78 Miller Light 79 Bed Bath & Beyond right after Thanksgiving. It’s a particular potpourri that at once evokes notes of pine and nutmeg, subtly undercut by the stench of drunken relatives. That particular year, we had the Jeff Stryker model. After the tree was well hung with balls, the humans of the house went to bed. But for the cats, the night was just beginning . After hours of being taunted by the tree’s blinking lights, our youngest and perkiest cat, Miller, gave in to temptation and pounced upon the wires. As Heintje’s effeminate voice sang of a silent, holy night, we woke to a loud crackling and electric popping sound, followed by a muffled thump on the opposite wall. After a brief search, the animal was discovered still smoking, his fur puffed like a dynamite Cleopatra Jones afro. His whiskers curled from the electric shock, Miller staggered off like a jittery extra from Pet Sematary, and slumped between piles of presents. The stacks of gifts seemed to get higher every year. My family doesn’t drive fancy cars. They don’t have ostentatious clothes, and they don’t take extravagant vacations. They don’t pretend to ski, or know famous people, and true crime novels and America’s Test Kitchen cookbooks are standard bedside reading. Christmas is the one time of year they like to show off a little. For my father, that meant buying my mother good suits for work, and jewelry from Tiffany’s. These special gifts never came on birthdays or anniversaries, but only at Christmastime, when my mother held court. She genuinely enjoyed these little powder-blueboxed tokens of my father’s esteem, and he loved giving them. At some point in the 1990s, however, everything changed. My mother was buying a card at a ninety-nine-cent store and saw something that would transform our lives forever. It was a Beanie Baby, and its siren song fell upon willing ears. A week later, she returned and bought another, and another. Before anyone realized it, she had a full-on addiction that required 80 Chanukah hundreds of small plexiglas boxes. The red sign on the door of the room where they are enshrined to this day warns “This Room Is Protected by Beanie Babies—Enter at Your Own Risk.” Rows upon rows of beady eyes follow you as you enter the room, pleading: “Play with us! Free us! Cut off our swing tags!” The collection grew. From the moment of that first purchase , all my mother wanted for Christmas was Beanie Babies. Once my father made his peace with that fact, he went to the ends of the earth to find her the ones that she wanted. We suspect that he is solely responsible for the surge in the Beanie market on eBay in the 1990s. My mother is not an easy woman to please, and the premise of finding something that would make her happy was an opportunity he was not going to pass up. And so Beanie Babies joined the presents under...