Chanukah
I give up. A holiday so difficult to spell, it took eight nights of celebrating to get it right.
I'd like to wish a happiest of Chanukahs to my Jewish brothers and sisters. Spin a dreidel, eat some matzo, and light a candle on your menorah for this reluctant Gentile.
The warm, celebratory atmosphere that envelopes this season reminds me of a game my friends and I used to play during lunch (and after school, and in class, and whenever our attention wasn't being properly channeled into a more productive vein). We called it ghetto dreidel. If I recall, it was really just a version of bloody knuckles in which we were too weak or scared to actually make each other bleed very often. Someone would set a quarter spinning on a flat surface, and if it came near you you had to flick it to keep it spinning. If you failed, the spinner had the high privilege of slamming the edge of the quarter into your exposed knuckles. But we've all been in prison so I'm sure I did't really need to explain that part.
I don't know why we called it ghetto dreidel, as if implying that we were too poor for a dreidel (unless the point was that it was violent), because, seriously, we were substituting the real toy with money. Surely there must have been a cheaper and thus more ghetto alternative. Maybe a wayward button? A nickel? A rusty hubcap from the gutter? Jew fail.
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