I thought Hanukkah was over. I thought the last candle had been lit, the last present open, and the last gelt eaten. I thought. But for me, today was like Hanukkah deja vu.
This morning I was listening on pandora to a genre station called “Rockin’ Holidays.” Now, Hanukkah is not my holiday, and it’s over so it’s pretty low on my radar. All the songs I had heard on Rockin’ Holidays were Christmas songs. I’ve got the music in the background and I hear this kind of hoe-down beat (think barn dance music) and they are singing very enthusiastically about
spinning the cradle.
SPINNING THE CRADLE??????
So I checked my song list — I can’t remember the title or the album (and that was hours ago so I can’t get the list back) but they were talking about spinning the DREIDEL. WHEW, I’m sure Baby Jesus prefers spinning dreidels to spinning cradles. I’m just sayin’.
So, I head in to church to my craft group (checking for spinning cradles along the way) and then I heard an interesting tale about something that happened in one of the services a couple of Sundays ago. Some background, we have a MIXED family in our church. He’s a Christian, she’s Jewish, and they are very comfortably raising their kids with exposure to both traditions (luckily, the Synagogue is close enough to the church that the kids can go to two Sunday schools).
So I’m sitting in craft group and one of the women says to TJM (the Jewish mom), “was that your daughter that said that“ YEP — so I got the background story.
Last Sunday (Dec. 2) was the first Sunday of Advent. So during children’s time all the kiddies were sitting up at the altar, surrounding our director of Religious Ed. She asked the question “What holiday is coming up that we’re all looking forward to?“
(Well, the one with the toys and chocolate of course).
