Season of Darkness, Season of Lights
Water steams on the stove keeping the chocolate pourable while I pop finished coins from the mold, half imprinted with a Star of David, half with a hanukiah. We are making our own gelt for the first time this year. I place each hardened coin onto a square of foil and Rena wraps it up, then carries the finished coins from the counter to add to the growing pile on the table. At the table Lee and ZMan are rolling sweet smelling, pliable sheets of brightly colored beeswax into candles. We have a menorah instead of the popular hanukiah, a seven-branched candlestick modeled after the great, golden ones first fashioned for the Tabernacle that the wandering Israelites carried with them through the wilderness of Caanan. Ours is a gift from my mother, made in Israel, inscribed with Hebrew words I cannot read. Rena informs me that next year she would like us to get a hanukiah so that we can light one candle each night instead of seven candles at once every night. Since our menorah has become loose in the base, I might just do that. I always kind of wanted to do it the traditional way myself as a kid, but my mother always had a menorah because it was more Biblical. And, there is something entrancing about the full set of candles burning each night, pushing back the darkness.
I strike a match and light our candles, many of them twice because the wick wasn’t quite long enough to take. There is a moment of silence as the final flame flickers into life.
“All right everyone, place your bets,” my ZMan says, breaking the silence.
This tradition is all our own. We always hand roll our candles because it’s so much more fun, which means that they burn irregularly. So we each pick a candle we think will be the last one burning. I choose a yellow one, the farthest on the left, which appears to be the most tightly rolled (by my husband, not Lee). There is some strategy to picking your candle, usually the more densely rolled ones last the longest. Sometimes, though, a loosely rolled candle will burn down to almost nothing in minutes, then proceed to smolder for long minutes more, outlasting all the rest. The girls haven’t learned the strategy yet and just pick their favorite candles. While they burn we divvy up the gelt and start spinning our dreidels. There is something surprisingly satisfying about spinning a top, the soft chunk as it’s point hits the table, the wobble, then the smooth whirl. Sometimes it stays in place and sometimes it seems to glide across the table, knocking into the menorah or the gelt in the “kitty,” the pile in the middle waiting to be won with a lucky spin. On her third try this time Rena achieves a real spin, not just a wobble and tumble like her dreidel’s done before. Her gasp and smile are pure delight. Three more times her dreidel whirls to life, smooth as a dancer, while we play, while the candles burn.
Today is the winter solstice, the longest night of the year. It is also Chanukah, the only winter holiday I grew up celebrating. In a few days it will be the new moon. I read a book out loud, another Chanukah tradition. This one, Hanukkah Moon, about a girl who celebrates the new moon during Chanukah with her aunt, who has recently immigrated from Mexico, by setting out bowls of nuts and berries to feed the wild creatures that feel safe creeping close in the dark of the moon. Earlier the girls and I scattered seeds for the birds and mice and squirrels on patches of ground where the snow had melted and where we have seen the animals search for food, or seen their tracks. Tomorrow we will string popcorn garlands and make balls of suet to hang on bushes in preparation for the big snow storm that we are expecting. It is good to burn candles on such a night, to sing songs and make our fingers and lips sticky with bittersweet chocolate. It is good to sit in the flickering light of seven candles and braid together the past and the future with this moment, this entwining of traditions new and old and ancient. Parenting is the opportunity to take everything that we were given and have learned, and make something new.
One by one our candles go out in a wisp of smoke, and mine is the last one burning. It doesn’t last long. The candles, like the season, burn out too quickly. But they are all the sweeter for it. In between the busy moments, the moments when I want to hide in my windowsill forest and just watch Christmas come from a distance, the moments when my shoulders tense and hunch with the weight of expectations riding on the cloak of the Yuletide, the moments when I feel myself torn between the season as I used to know it and the season as I am coming to know it, the moments when I would like to give up and just disappoint everyone and take a break already…in between all those moments are moments like this one, moments of pure magic.
This season, as The Mother labors to bring forth the light, I wish you all contemplation.
This season, as the earth sleeps, I wish you all mindful rest.
This season, as we work to bring delight into the faces of our loved ones, especially the children, may we all light up with the magic that is to be found in traditions based in love. I wish you all mindful play.
This season, as the drab ground and naked trees are draped in pristine white, and breath swirls into personal clouds before vanishing, and cold draws us in and together, I wish you all serenity.
May it be.