Christmas-Chanukah: What’s the Difference?

 

Just in case there might be someone who is not keenly aware of the differences between Christmas and Chanukah….

1. Christmas is one day, same day every year, December 25. Jews also love December 25th. It’s another paid day off work. We go to movies and out for Chinese food and Israeli dancing.

    Chanukah is 8 days. It starts the evening of the 24th of Kislev, whenever that falls. No one is ever sure. Jews never know until a non-Jewish friend asks when Chanukah starts, forcing us to consult a calendar so we don’t look like idiots. We all have the same calendar, provided free with a donation from the World Jewish Congress, the kosher butcher, or the local Sinai Memorial Chapel (especially in Florida ) or other Jewish funeral home.

2. Christmas is a major holiday.

    Chanukah is a minor holiday with the same theme as most Jewish holidays. They tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat.

3. Christians get wonderful presents such as jewelry, perfume, stereos….

    Jews get practical presents such as underwear, socks, or the collected works of the Rambam, which looks impressive on the bookshelf.

4. There is only one way to spell Christmas (Xmas doesn’t count).

    No one can decide how to spell Chanukah, Chanukkah, Chanukka, Channukah, Hanukah, Hannukah, etc.

5. Christmas is a time of great pressure for husbands and boy friends . Their partners expect special gifts.

    Jewish men are relieved of that burden. No one expects a diamond ring on Chanukah.

6. Christmas brings enormous electric bills.

    Wax candles are used for Chanukah. Not only are we spared enormous electric bills, but we get to feel good about not contributing to the energy crisis.

7. Christmas carols are beautiful…Silent Night, Come All Ye Faithful….

    Chanukah songs are about dreidels made from clay or having a party and dancing the hora. Of course, we are secretly pleased that many of the beautiful carols were composed and written by our tribal brethren such as Irving Berlin and Mel Torme. And don’t Barbara Streisand and Neil Diamond sing them beautifully?

8. A home preparing for Christmas smells wonderful. The sweet smell of cookies and cakes baking. Happy people are gathered around in festive moods.

    A home preparing for Chanukah smells of oil, potatoes, and onions. The home, as always, is full of loud people all talking at once.

9. Women have fun baking Christmas cookies.

    Women burn their eyes and cut their hands grating potatoes and onions for latkas on Chanukah. Another reminder of our suffering through the ages.

10. Parents deliver gifts to their children during Christmas mornings.

     Jewish parents have no qualms about withholding a gift on any of the eight nights.
11. The players in the Christmas story have easy to pronounce names such as Mary, Joseph, and Jesus.

     The players in the Chanukah story are Antiochus , Judah Maccabee, and Matta whatever. No one can spell it or pronounce it. On the plus side, we can tell our friends anything and they believe we are wonderfully versed in our history.

12. Many Christians believe in the virgin birth.

     Jews think, ‘Joseph, you shmuck, snap out of it. Your woman is pregnant, you didn’t sleep with her, and now you want to blame G-d. Here’s the number of my shrink’.

13. In recent years, Christmas has become more and more commercialized.

     The same holds true for Chanukah, even though it is a minor holiday. It makes sense. How could we market a major holiday such as Yom Kippur? Forget about celebrating. Think observing. Come to synagogue, starve yourself for 27 hours, become one with your dehydrated soul, beat your chest, confess your sins, a guaranteed good time for you and your family. Tickets a mere $200 per person.

14. Christmas has Santa Claus

Jews don’t have a Mr. Menorah. Santa Claus proves the ultimate cop-out for Christian parents.  If a child dislikes the gifts received, parents can blame it on miscommunications with the North Pole.

To all of you, a Happy Chanukah, Merry Christmas, Festivus for the Rest of Us, Happy Kwanzaa and a healthy, joyous 2009

Injun Givers

Happy Native American Heritage Day — well at least, for this year! 

Congress set aside today, the Friday after Thanksgiving, as the first national day to recognize the contributions of Native American tribes to the country we stole from them as illegal aliens back in 1620 (Take that, Lou Dobbs). 

However, unless Congress takes further action, Native American Heritage Day will be a singular event — another broken metaphorical treaty between the US government and a people who, to their ongoing detriment, took Washington leaders at their word.

If Congress decides to make Native American Heritage Day an annual Federal holiday, the holiday most likely will be slotted on the fourth Friday in November (aka the “day after” Thanksgiving). And once again, our countries indigenous citizens will get screwed.

A “day after” holiday offers Native Americans another ancillary role to the “white man’s” interests, a footnote to history once again. And with most Federal workers taking the “day after” Thanksgiving off anyway, the government saves on an extra paid holiday. 

A Native American Heritage Day could replace Columbus Day, pretty much a wasted observance that essentially has little to do with our nation’s history. Actually, the Vikings — and perhaps the Chinese — came here first and thought better of the effort. Columbus, the Gilligan, of his time, missed his intended harbor in India by a mere 8,000 miles and foolishly stuck the indigenous populations with the misnomer “Indians.” However, taking Columbus Day from East Coast Italians is paramount to stripping our nation’s capital football team of its racist “Redskins” moniker, so such an obvious observance switch never will occur.

Supporters of the “day after” tribute cite the selfless hospitality of the local Patuxet Wompanoag tribe with saving the inept alien pilgrims from oblivion – nearly half the Anglos died in their first year here.  The tribe taught them how to grow domestic crops and hunt in the forests. In return for saving their hides, the pilgrims signed a “treaty of friendship” with the Patuxet, the first of centuries of swindles and frauds against tribes in the name of “good will.” The treaty turned out to be a land grab contract, which the tribes who lacked any concept of “land ownership” failed to grasp. Then the group sat down to the first Thanksgiving feast. If the Patuxet knew what came next, they’d have choked on their drumsticks. 

Thus began an aborigine Armageddon. America’s wielding of torture did not begin against “enemy combatants” in Gitmo, but against Geronimo. Worse, the genocide perpetrated against native americans came under the deceit of “friendship” and “peace”. Blankets laced with smallpox, germs in which Indians had no immunity, became our first bioterrorism weapon. The Trail of Tears footsteps predated train tracks to Auschwitz. Andrew Jackson was our Adolph Hitler. The value of trophies Nazis stole from Jews pales to the property stolen from Indians through outright slaughter or thievery. Wounded Knee was as American pogrom. 

I’m no “Cherokee princess,” but growing up as a Jewish princess, I knew the shame that came with celebrating a “subordinate” holiday. All through grade school, I suffered through yearly “winter pageants” sitting on stage with my Christian peers who sang Christ’s praises while my silence resounded. Jewish students finally received recognition when we performed our “traditional Chanukah” song, from which the music teacher always chose I Have A Little Dreidel. No, traditional Rock of Ages, not even the the Hebrew version Sivivon, Sov, Sov, Sov — nope, always I Have A Little Dreidel until I turned high school freshman. And the school marms even bastardized our innocuous dreidel song with verses about feasts of duck and yams. Never did my family nibble on duck or yams on any Chanukah night. I guess the goys couldn’t translate latkas.

A few years ago, I attended a week-long seminar on Cherokee history sponsored by Rice University. I never knew that the Cherokees (and all native americans) were such intelligent, prosperous, educated, sophisticated and cultural people. The first democracy in the America was established not by our Founding Fathers but by many Indian tribes, whose forms of government were the inspiration for our Constitution. I did not know that Cherokees had a written language, a first for Indian tribes, published their own newspapers, and operated their own schools and hospitals. Prior to the Trail of Tears forced expulsion, Cherokees owned land, including large plantations in the South, engaged in commerce, dressed in fashionable duds, fought with US military and worked in the US government.  

I never learned about continual history of Federal atrocities against all native american tribes in school. I listened aghast at this horror that we call “Indian Affairs,” how every treaty, even today, comes with pages of tiny print addendums. I grew up in the upper Midwest where our local minority group was Lakota, not black. Their biggest offense, drunkenness. We criminalized Indian’s ceremonial peyote, sage and other medicinal herbs, and substituted our liquor, as white man’s choice of a substance to abuse. 

Even today, the white men co-opt Indian traditions from greed. Self-proclaimed “shamans” with the obligatory quarter drop of “indian” red platelets hold workshops teaching secret Indian rituals to eager Anglo seekers for hundreds of wampum. These sham shamans fail to tell their patsies that true native shamans never advertise nor take any payment for services rendered to the tribe. True shamans refuse to “teach” outsiders any sacred magic for fear of misuse and fraud. 

The Federal government hates to apologize for past “oversights.”  We offer welfare checks today in lieu of centuries of slave wages. The US doesn’t torture, only enhances interrogation techniques when necessary. Hiroshima saved millions of (Allied) lives by preventing an invasion of Japan. That millions of Japanese civilians faced a nuclear holocaust becomes a footnote in our history books.

So celebrate Native American Heritage Day  — before we take it back as well.