The Festival of Slights

The Holy Family celebrates the Festival of Lights. Inset: Joseph basks in the warm glow of the menorah while Baby Jesus, clearly excited, awaits his turn with the dreidel. Mary stands by, greedily eyeing the mah jongg tiles.





Chanukah is the joyful eight-day winter festival during which Jews around the world eschew the usual and heavy ingestion of schmaltz (rendered chicken fat, the preferred seasoning) to celebrate instead The Miracle of the Oil™, as evidenced by the seasonal depletion of U.S. Crisco® stores from secret government aquifers in the midwest. Many complain that in recent decades Chanukah has been "christified" as a means to keep up with the overwrought commercialization of the season: a vigorous emphasis on Chanukah decorations, Chanukah gift buying, and Chanukah gift giving has superceded traditional family values and eroded the more benign Chanukah traditions of high-test sugar consumption, gambling, and household pyrotechnics. Lest we forget, Chanukah is a time to commemorate a small band of guerillas* who reclaimed their defiled place of worship amid a fierce and protracted conflict, and the miracle of the oil later fabricated by rebbes in cahoots with OPEC in order to generate consumer desire for oil-saturated fried foods (despite unfortunate and well-known side effects such as arteriosclerosis, heart disease, acne, and anal leakage).

This year, the first night of Chanukah fell on Christmas. While this may have distracted some members of the Jewish community from Chanukah responsibilities, or allowed gentile friends to conveniently ignore their own (you know who you are), I should not have to remind the reader that Christmas is, after all, a time when people all around the world are expected or required by law to honor the birthday of the most famous Jew that ever lived. (Unless you live in France, where that honor still inexplicably falls to Jerry Lewis.)

*Guerrilla tactics are based on ambush, sabotage, and "playing stupid," and their ultimate objective is usually to destabilize an authority through long, low-intensity confrontation and relentless whining. It can be quite successful against an unpopular foreign regime or intractable parents: a guerrilla army may increase the cost of maintaining an occupation or a colonial presence above what the foreign power may wish to bear.