New York: Hanukkah is in the air at the Jewish Museum, where author and illustrator Maurice Sendak has curated a selection of 32 Hanukkah lamps (through Jan. 29, $12 museum admission). The New York Historical Society is celebrating A New York Hanukkah, displaying a Hanukkiah designed by Bronx-based silversmith Bernard Bernstein (through Jan. 8, $15 admission). For something more crowd-sourced, head uptown to Grand Army Plaza Tuesday evening (and each subsequent night of Hanukkah) for the lighting of the world’s largest menorah—it’s 23 feet tall and weighs 4,000 pounds. Or pick up Israeli designer Laura Cowan’s more portable slide magnet menorah from new Brooklyn design store Module R and arrange the candles any way you like (Module R, $225). Trust us, we know menorahs.

Newly shorn reggae singer Matisyahu brings his annual Festival of Light to the Music Hall of Williamsburg Monday night for four nights of concerts. Maybe, just maybe, he’ll eke out eight nights (Dec. 19, 20, 21, 8 p.m.; Dec. 22, 7 p.m., $35). For those equally ambivalent on facial hair, perhaps this beanie hat with detachable yarn beard is just the ticket (Moderntribe.com, $35). The National Yiddish Theater-Folksbiene brings their old school charm to the Arts World Financial Center Sunday with My Yiddishe Chanukah, a festive showcase of holiday songs and klezmer melodies (Dec. 18, 12 p.m., free). On Tuesday, The Sephardic Music Festival presents popular musical acts Nuriya, Pharaoh’s Daughter, and Haale at Le Poisson Rouge (Dec. 20, 7 p.m., $18), while the band Girls in Trouble, led by Alicia Jo Rabin, takes the stage Wednesday at the Museum of Jewish Heritage (Dec. 21, 7 p.m., $15). After their set, head to the museum’s gift shop and pick up these awesome-looking eco-friendly dreidels made from recycled newspaper (Pickman Museum Shop, $10-$15).

The third annual Latke Festival takes place Monday evening, with attendees sampling the potato-pancake offerings of local restaurants like Kutsher’s Tribeca and Veselka and judges choosing the winning recipe (Dec. 19, 6:30 p.m., $30). For that vain latke enthusiast in your life, how about the I’m So Flippin’ Hot mirrored spatula? They’ll thank you later, we promise (Fred Flare, $24). If you’re shopping for more of a foodie, we recommend this mildly offensive Ah Choo pepper mill—shaped like a giant nose. Form and function! (Fred Flare, $22). Or take them to Shelsky’s Smoked Fish in Brooklyn and enjoy the holiday menu, which boasts five different potato latke items. Christmas envy? Not on our watch.

Girl-power aficionado Gloria Steinem joins the activism-inclined five-piece pop rock band Betty for their late show on Tuesday (Dec. 20, 9:30 p.m., $25), while the Schlep Sisters host the fifth annual burlesque holiday show, Menorah Horah, tomorrow night (Dec. 15, 8 p.m., $15 general admission). Since the somewhat disappointing Nice Jewish Guys 2012 calendar just might not do it for most of your gal pals, support female graphic artists and instead gift Kate Beaton’s new book, Hark! A Vagrant (TopatoCo, $19.95). Another option for the superheroes in your life—the more Jewish, the better, some say—is Peter A. David’s new book, The Spider Man Vault (Amazon, $28.30). And if you’re still up for more partying after Hanukkah ends, you can always celebrate New Year’s Eve with the riotous Sandra Bernhard at Joe’s Pub (Dec. 31, 11 p.m., $150).

Elsewhere: Nextbook Press deputy editor Wayne Hoffman will discuss his new novel, Sweet Like Sugar, on Sunday at congregation Oseh Shalom in Maryland. An exhibit on Chicago’s Jewish history runs through the end of the month (through Dec. 29, free). In San Francisco, the Contemporary Jewish Museum plays host to a Houdini-themed Hanukkah concert on Thursday, with Leonard Cohen tunes performed by all-male musical group, Conspiracy of Beards (Dec. 22, 6 p.m., $5). On Monday, the Klezmatics perform a holiday concert Monday at the L.A. Philharmonic (Dec. 19, 8 p.m., $38 and up).

At the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, New York Times reporter Diana Henriques discusses Bernie Madoff—the grinchiest Grinch of all—whose case she reported on extensively, visiting Madoff twice in jail (Dec. 21, 7 p.m., $20). On a lighter, less scandalous note, the San Francisco MOMA offers a screening of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 sci-fi creation, 2001: A Space Odyssey (Dec. 29, 7 p.m., $5). Bring these trippy Dreidel Vision Goggles for full viewing effect (The Jewish Museum, $3). But please, don’t spin and drive.

Abroad: London’s Jewish Community Centre hosts a three-day-long, family-friendly Hanukkah party (Dec. 18, 2-4 p.m.; Dec. 19, 20, 11 a.m.-4 p.m., free). Groovy, baby? Jerusalem’s Encore Educational Theatre Company tackles yet another Gilbert and Sullivan musical, putting on seven showings of H.M.S. Pinafore (Dec. 27-Jan. 5, see showtimes, NIS 100). For the younger relatives in Israel, children’s game Bananagrams is now available in Hebrew (Modern Tribe, $20).

Happy holidays. Agenda returns in January, 2012.

Tips: culture@tabletmag.com

For the privileged hellion
If you really loved your adorable demon child, you’d buy him the vintage red tricycle belonging to little Damien in The Omen. The priceless mom-murdering prop from the 1976 film is up for auction at Bonhams in the UK. Sure, the estimate is £12,000-£15,000 (in the neighborhood of $20K) but do you want your kid not to be the first on the block with a possessed trike?

For the Sigmund Freud-to-be
From a German manufacturer (of course) come these not-at-all-tacky psychiatric plush toys. Kroko the paranoid crocodile, Dub the depressed turtle, Lilo the obsessive-compulsive hippo, and Dolly the delusional sheep (with a plush wolf inside her) all await your child’s ministrations.

For the progeny of mid-century design-obsessed hipsters
Alexander Girard Alphabet Blocks will help force any child into the box created by his parents’ rigid aesthetic sensibilities. This gift is beautiful and tactile and will allow parents to lecture the child about fonts, typographic frameworks, and folk art opulence until his ears bleed.

For the rebel
My First Bacon.

For the foodie fashionista
What goes with a fuzzy felt falafel hair clip besides, oh, everything? How about an F is for Falafel onesie?

For the too-cool-for-school teen
Teach her where Bubbe and the Park Slope Parents Mailing List came from by way of a fabulous filigree necklace shaped like a Brooklyn brownstone.

For the little frequent flier
Does your family jet off regularly to see the mishpocha in far-off states? Are you anxious about sending little Joshua through those radiation-emitting backscatters? Get him these timely underpants with “READ THE 4TH AMENDMENT, PERVERTS” emblazoned on the crotch.

For David Amrams in training
Conductor, composer, French horn player, flutist, Amram can do it all. And so can your child, if you give her this bathtub flute kit. The kid fills the brightly colored plastic flutes with water up to the graduated lines on their sides, then starts tootling away. The flutes come with color-coded sheet music printed on laminated cards that stick to a wet tile wall. If these don’t turn your child into a conductor-in-residence at the Philharmonic by age 7, you have failed.

For the kid who will be a doctor when she grows up, knock wood
The You Explore It: Human Body science kit includes a model of the human body, tweezers, forceps, and 21 squishy, squeezable internal organs (you’ll love the bladder!), bones, and muscles. Have the child practice on the plastic model, then on Uncle Murray at the seder in April.

For the itty-bitty Helena Rubenstein or Estée Lauder
Who doesn’t want a cosmetics mogul in the family? Scientific Explorer’s Perfumery will allow any child to craft different intoxicating scents, learn the science behind their creation, then sell them to classmates at a hefty profit with the promise of eternal youth and beauty.

For the doll-obsessed
Let’s assume our young collector already has Rebecca Rubin, the 1914 Lower East Side Jewish American Girl doll that sells for a mere $95. But does she have Rebecca’s Shabbat accessories (teeny challah, samovar, tea, and candlesticks) for $68, her Hanukkah set (itty-bitty menorah, wooden dreidl, and gelt) for $22, her schoolbag (eensy-weensy bagel, rugelach, pickles, and “you’re a grand old flag” sheet music) for $36, or her Coney Island souvenirs (infinitesimal postcards, Steeplechase Park flyer, music box that plays “over the waves” and admission token) for $32? How much money do you have? For a Lower East Side immigrant child, Rebecca has a lot of stuff. (The Rebecca books are quite good! But I know, I promised. No books. Feh.)

For the would-be comedian
Let’s be honest. Don’t we all need a remote-controlled fart machine?

For the animal lover/humanitarian
Yes, honey, we know you want a pony. You can’t have a pony. You can, however, have a llama. A llama from Heifer International that will not live in our house in Bloomfield Hills but rather go directly to a poor family in Bolivia so they can start a farm and sell wool and their children can have an education. And we will talk about gratitude and tzedakah and we will eat some latkes and make an online donation to Mazon, the Jewish charity that fights hunger. And fine, you can have this little toy llama. There is an awesome book that goes with it, Llama Llama Red Pajama, but I’m not even going to mention it. Chag Sameach.

The textile thing brought me to an opportunity fo study in Guatemala, which I was skeptical about, even after my art school experience. >>

Tropical Secrets: Holocaust Refugees in Cuba by Margarita Engle (Macmillan). It’s 1939. Daniel, age 13, is a German-Jewish refugee. His grandfather was killed on Kristallnacht; his parents, poor musicians, wiped out their savings to shove him onto a ship they thought was going to New York. But Daniel instead winds up in Cuba, where he befriends Paloma, 12, whose corrupt father is making a lot of money off Cuba’s suddenly huge refugee population. The book is written entirely in verse, in short poems spoken by its different characters. The language is ravishing—you feel the heat, smell the flowers, see the turquoise and yellow casitas, taste the ice cream. Images of broken glass and musical notes abound. And I learned stuff—I had no idea the Cuban government locked up non-Jews of German descent, fearing they were Nazi spies. There’s even suspense—will Paloma’s evil father catch and punish our heroes as they try to hide an intermarried couple? So much happens in so few words. Yet I fear this book will be hurt by its lousy title and subtitle (“Tropical Secrets” sounds like a Cinemax porno, and “Holocaust Refugees in Cuba” sounds like a boring history paper). And the cover is pretty but bland, exactly the opposite of what’s inside. This book is vibrant, exciting and moving—definitely my favorite of the year. I pray young readers will open it. (Grades 4-10)

Strawberry Hill by Mary Ann Hoberman, illustrated by Wendy Anderson Halperin (Little, Brown). I am crotchety: I hated the title of the last book; I hate the art in this one. Josie wouldn’t pick it up because the book looked both dated and babyish, with its garish cover and super-perky protagonist with long braids. But inside is old-fashioned storytelling of the best sort. Set during the Great Depression, the story is about 10-year-old Allie, coping with her family’s move to a new house in a new town on a street called Strawberry Hill. Once I forced Josie to pick it up, by denying her food and water for several days, she adored it. Hoberman, our nation’s Children’s Poet Laureate, is a terrific storyteller, and she gets girl-friendship dynamics just right. Allie wants to be best friends with her new neighbor Martha, who is pretty and self-possessed; she does not want to be socially tainted by her new neighbor Mimi, who is chubby and over-eager and unpopular (but secretly pretty fun). When Martha’s best friend Cynthia (deliciously hateful) calls Allie a “dirty Jew,” Allie has to figure out what her own values really are. The book offers important but not leaden lessons about tolerance, and any girl who has navigated the treacherous waters of friendship (that is: any girl) will appreciate the satisfying resolution. (Grades 2–5)

The Brooklyn Nine: A Novel in Nine Innings by Alan Gratz (Dial Books for Young Readers). Nine generations of the Schneider family have loved baseball, and each generation gets an inning—I mean, a chapter—in The Brooklyn Nine. In 1845, 10-year-old Felix Schneider arrives from Germany and falls in with the New York Knickerbockers, a volunteer fire brigade that plays a familiar game when they’re not battling blazes. In 1864, Louis’s son Arnold meets his hero, one of baseball’s first stars, now a drunk and dissolute vaudevillian. In 1908, Arnold’s son Walter, batboy for the Brooklyn Superbas, tries to sneak the first African-American player into the majors by telling everyone he’s Native American. In 1926, Walter’s daughter Frankie, a Brooklyn Dodgers-worshipping math whiz, runs numbers for a local mobster and befriends a louche New York Times sportswriter. And so on. There’s more than 150 years of history here, and it all goes down easy, as delicious as peanuts and Crackerjack. You learn about the Civil War, the All-American Girls Baseball League, Sputnik and, um, eBay. There’s loads of humor and familial warmth, and Gratz does a great job with characterization, especially given how short the chapters are. (Frankie’s my fave.) Endnotes clarify what’s history and what’s poetic license; that New York Times sportswriter actually existed! I’m not a huge baseball fan but I adored this book—I can only imagine how an actual baseball fan would plotz. (Grades 4-9)

The Doll Shop Downstairs by Yona Zeldis McDonough, illustrated by Heather Maione (Viking Juvenile). This tale feels as if it could have been written a lifetime ago. Loosely based on the true story of how Madame Alexander dolls were created, The Doll Shop Downstairs looks at a Russian-Jewish family on the Lower East Side at the dawn of World War I. The family owns a doll-repair shop, but when war breaks out, doll parts can no longer be sent from Germany. The financial situation looks grim until Anna, the family’s middle daughter, has an idea that saves the day. McDonough (The Doll with the Yellow Star) does beautifully with the sibling rivalry among the family’s three daughters, and Josie loved the way the book depicts imaginative play with broken dolls awaiting service in the shop. The book isn’t as rich and detailed as the All-of-a-Kind Family series, but it has loads of flavor. (Minor quibble: why did no one catch that the name of legendary toy store F.A.O. Schwarz is misspelled throughout?) (Grades 1-4)

Brenda Berman, Wedding Expert by Jane Breskin Zalben, illustrated by Victoria Chess (Clarion). “Brenda had this whole wedding planned, and it wasn’t really important whose wedding it was.” Drama queen Brenda has always wanted to be a flower girl in a gold lamé dress with sparkly shoes and a diamond tiara, walking down an aisle alone. But her beloved uncle and soon-to-be aunt are ruining her vision with ideas of their own. They want her in lavender? They want her to walk with some other girl, her new aunt’s niece? Feh. But in the end, Brenda stops being such a pill and discovers that weddings are really about welcoming new family into our lives. And about having cake and punch, recipes for which are included in the back. This book, from the creators of Baby Babka, the Gorgeous Genius, offers a heroine who’s high-spirited but not as annoying as that farshtunkiner Eloise or Pinkalicious. I like the friendly, small, square size and the lumpy, big-nosed jolie-laide (that’s putting it politely) drawings—Brenda looks like the mutant offspring of Tomi DePaola (Strega Nona) and Harriet Pincus (Tell me a Mitzi). (Grades K-3)

Lost by Jacqueline Davies (Marshall Cavendish). Essie is a 16-year-old seamstress on the Lower East Side who adores and spoils her beloved little sister Zelda. Harriet is a secretive, snazzily dressed new worker at the garment factory where Essie works. Their stories are suffused with secrets. They’re both, well, lost. And the sense of foreboding is almost unbearable. I had a hard time getting through the first 50 pages. But I am an adult who knows the history of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, where the girls work, and I am the mother of a little girl who is a lot like Zelda. Tween and teen readers won’t have this baggage. And I suspect they’ll love this book. Yes, there’s an awful lot of coincidence to keep the wheels of the plot turning, but the atmosphere and details are beautifully drawn. And when the fire finally arrives—whoa. (An afternote offers still more historical perspective.) It’s hard to believe the same writer wrote The Lemonade War, a middle-grade novel about contemporary suburban kids competing to sell tasty beverages. Now that’s range. (Grades 7-12).

The Importance of Wings by Robin Friedman (Charlesbridge). This story is set in the 1980s; the main character is almost exactly my age. The title, of course, refers to the perfect flip of feathered hair, created with a round brush and a blowdryer. Josie was baffled and fascinated as I explained how vital good wings really were to my preteen identity back then. But Roxanne, 13, has even more problems than I did: she’s Israeli and desperate to assimilate, her dad’s away all day driving a cab, her mom’s off visiting family in Israel, she lives in Staten Island next to a house all the neighborhood kids think is cursed, she’s afraid of gym class, and she’s not popular. So she escapes into reruns: Little House on the Prairie, Superfriends, The Brady Bunch, Wonder Woman—all illustrations of the elusive, ideal American life she craves. Then another Israeli girl, Liat, moves in next door, and Roxanne gradually learns to reframe what’s important. This was Josie’s favorite book on the list, and it’s very readable. I like that it depicts completely secular Israelis, a portrayal that may surprise many American kids. (Grades 3-7)

Albert Einstein by Kathleen Krull, illustrated by Boris Kulikov (Viking Juvenile). A biography of the genius, written and illustrated by the same team that created the brilliant 2008 picture book Fartiste, about Edwardian-era Moulin Rouge gas-passing performance artist Joseph Pujol, “the man who made his pants dance.” (Talk about range! Jacqueline Davies, you just got schooled.) This book grabs you from its very first, unpretentious sentence: “Albert Einstein had major bedhead.” Krull uses terrific anecdotes and quotations from the great man (he said of himself, “I am no Einstein”) and discusses how he coped with anti-Semitism and the terrifying consequences of his discovery of relativity. (He became an anti-war and social-justice activist.) The book doesn’t shy away from Einstein’s darkness—it talks about his arrogance, crappy people skills, crappier parenting, and even crappier husbanding. (“I treat my wife as an employee whom I cannot fire,” he said.) I still don’t understand much of the science in the book, despite a noble effort by Krull; she works around the physics by explaining that fiber optics, TV, cell phones, smoke alarms, and GPS systems wouldn’t exist today without Einstein’s work in quantum theory. That works for me. (Grades 4-7)

There you go. Happy Hanukkah! Buy a book!

With Thanksgiving behind us, the Christmas juggernaut looms with all of its holiday-themed cinematic treacle, unavoidable musical kitsch, and inedible rum-soaked cakes. Joel Waldfogel, professor of economics at the Wharton School of Business, concentrates on one aspect of the seasonal narishkeyt in Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Holidays (Princeton, November). He argues that purchasing obligatory holiday gifts offends financial logic, as a $100 sweater worth, say, $30 to its recipient represents a colossal waste of resources—especially as that transaction repeats millions of times. Though it could be argued that Hanukkah, with its relatively recent tradition of eight nights of presents, offends in this respect even more than Christmas, Waldfogel notes that wasteful gift-giving was not a part of his childhood: “I’m Jewish,” he remarks, “and I first encountered Christmas through my wife . . . and her very generous family.”

* * *

Lee Eisenberg, former editor of Esquire, would call Waldfogel a “Buy Scold,” a curmudgeonly critic of American consumerism. In Shoptimism: Why the American Consumer Will Keep on Buying No Matter What (Free Press, November), Eisenberg argues that people spend with reckless abandon because shopping satisfies their fundamental needs—”What we buy confers instant membership in a community or, more fashionably, a ‘tribe,’” he writes, and, by choosing particular brands, we “express our values”—and that’s fine with him. Does it make one a hopeless curmudgeon to suggest, though, that more lasting and satisfying means for building community and expressing values might be located in religion, art, or public service, rather than at the mall?

* * *

Perpetuating a community built upon values is a lot more difficult than building one around a brand of sneakers or handbags, though, because disagreements crop up so frequently among members of the former sort of tribe as to what exactly it is that unites them. As he discusses with Vox Tablet this week, Yale computer scientist David Hillel Gelernter sees this as a Jewish problem: “Unless the essence of Judaism is written down as plainly as can be,” he proclaims, rather dramatically, “the loosening grip most American Jews maintain on the religion of their ancestors will fail completely, and the community will plummet into the anonymous depths of history.” Hoping to prevent this, and speaking from the perspective of Orthodoxy—which he refers to as “normative Judaism”—Gelernter offers up “four theme-images,” each of which “captures all of Judaism from a certain angle,” in Judaism: A Way of Being (Yale, November).

Ask a different Jew, get a different “Jewish essence”: Esther Benbassa, an eminent French scholar of Sephardic Jewish history, proposes in Suffering as Identity: The Jewish Paradigm (Verso, November) that victimhood has perniciously become the thematic core of Jewish personal and communal identity in modernity. That writers and scholars produce such reductions of Jewish diversity to a putative Jewish essence regularly, and in doing so contradict one another, suggests that maybe the sage Shammai got this one right: Jewishness and Judaism just cannot be summarized while standing on one leg.

* * *

Waldfogel notwithstanding, Americans’ irrational holiday spending has some beneficiaries: the young Israelis without work visas, for example, who staff kiosks in middle American malls during the holiday rush, hawking tchotchkes 13 hours at a stretch, six days a week. Hank Stuever’s Tinsel: A Search for America’s Christmas Present (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, November), which tracks the holiday rituals of Frisco, Texas, includes a brief profile of one such Israeli, Eitan, who admits he’s shocked by the reception a certain bearded gentleman receives at the mall: “I have never seen a Santa Claus,” he remarks. “He is like Paris Hilton here.” As much as the vitality of the contemporary Israeli economy owes to the country’s compulsory military service and a regular influx of Diaspora Jews and their money—as Dan Senor and Saul Singer explain in Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle (Twelve, November)—the extraordinary work ethic of guys like Eitan, willing to take awful gigs to save up for their post-military R&R trips through South America and India, explains some of it, too.

* * *

Jews’ dislike for Christmas runs deeper than an objection to the holiday’s cheap sentimentality and lousy aesthetics: at times—for example, in Warsaw in 1881—Christmas has served as a pretext for vicious pogroms against alleged Christ-killers. That such Christian enmity could be stirred up against Jews over the centuries is even more of a shame than we tend to think, or so suggests Adiel Schremer’s Brothers Estranged: Heresy, Christianity and Jewish Identity in Late Antiguity (Oxford, November). Schremer argues that rather than defining themselves in opposition to Christians, as has often been assumed, Jews in the first century CE concentrated more on their enmity for the Romans. Early Jews and Christians, in other words, clashed less than their descendants have.

* * *

For all those Jewish parents, grandparents, and aunts and uncles unwilling to follow Waldfogel’s counsel and eschew gifts, publishers provide plenty of children’s books as potential Hanukkah presents. Among the new offerings this year, a few charmingly bring the holiday spirit to the animal kingdom. The teddy bear protagonist of Don Freeman’s 1968 classic, Corduroy, encounters the holiday in a board book, Happy Hanukkah, Corduroy (Viking, October, ages 0-2), while rabbits devour latkes in Hoppy Hanukkah! (Albert Whitman, September, ages 2-5), and, in Menorah Under the Sea (Kar-Ben, September, ages 5-9), a marine biologist constructs a hanukkiya out of sea urchins. These are certainly more child-friendly than the violent, apocryphal Books of the Maccabees.

* * *

Finally, here’s a stocking stuffer for folks who’d love to take the Christ out of Christmas: Greg Epstein, a Humanist rabbi, former rock-and-roller, and director of the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard, insists that you don’t need God to enforce morality. In Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe (Morrow, November), Epstein reaches out to progressive people of all faiths as well as to confirmed atheists, insisting that instead of Christopher Hitchens’ and Richard Dawkins’ anti-religious acrimony, atheists can emphasize the values and beliefs that bind them together. And, by the way, he’s all for Hanukkah: “Celebrating holidays is a natural, welcome, necessary part of human life,” he observes, “and a Humanism or atheism worth its salt does not callously or humorlessly dismiss this need.” Who’s up for some oily HumanLight latkes?

Plush Mohel Scissors

The perfect gift for a new baby, a jealous older sibling, or a little feminist who is really, really annoyed about the Stupak-Pitts amendment.

Available at Oytoys.com, $6.95 plus shipping.

Ten Plagues Finger Puppets

Why does hail look like Conan O’Brien? Why does darkness look like a throwback to a minstrel show? Why would you encourage your child to put a slain first-born on his wedding-ring finger? Is it some kind of subliminal “marry a Jew or you’re dead to me” messaging? You know what, just put the other nine puppets away and have your kid walk around with the dead first-born on his ring finger, croaking “Redrum! Redrum!” It will freak out your college student cousin who got high in the car before coming in for latkes.

Available at Judaica Enterprises, $18 plus shipping.

Star of David 3D Glasses

Your child is asking uncomfortable questions. Why does everyone have a Christmas tree except us? Why doesn’t Santa visit my house? Why do all these twinkling lights make me feel so lonely? Before you cave and get a Hanukkah bush, slap a pair of Star of David 3D glasses on the kid’s face and watch his eyes light up! Every bulb, streetlamp, and Christmas light he sees will be transformed into spinning holographic images of Jewish stars. Crisis averted!

Available at Gemini Specs, $1.95 plus shipping.

Samson Action Figure

Wait, his hair is plastic. I guess we could melt it. I totally know where Mom hides the matches. Or we could try to carve it with the electric knife you stole from the drawer. God, could his face look any less badass? He looks like Hannah Montana’s dad.

Available at Amazon.com, $29.95, eligible for free shipping with Amazon Prime.

Harvey Nagila Dancing Doll

True story. My dad got us this toy when Josie was tiny. Josie took one look at its impassive, sunglassed face and clung to my leg. When Harvey began shimmying to Hava Nagila, she screamed and crawled behind the couch so fast she left skid marks. Harvey sat, unloved, on a shelf for three years until Maxine was born. We took it down again. Because we are stupid. When Harvey began to clap, Maxine let out an inhuman wail, covered her face, and started shaking. She became haunted by it, her own personal dybbuk, and, in a ritualistic fervor that would make Freud proud, insisted on watching it dance over and over, quaking as it scared the bejeezus out of her. Buy Harvey Nagila and you too will know this fun.

Available at Traditions Jewish Gifts, $17.95 plus shipping.

Techno Draydel with Lights and Sound Effects

Do you miss the rave scene of the carefree early 90s? Give little Ezekiel a bottle of water, a glowstick, some massage oil, and this toy. Crank up the Goa trance and let him spin around the living room. He already has the pacifier.

Available at Jewish Book House, $4.79 plus shipping.

Jewish Major Leaguers Baseball Cards, Collectors Edition

“OMG, Dad, you spent $918 for this?! Why? Why do you expect me to live your dreams? I hate baseball! I just want to dance!”

Available at Amazon.com, $918 plus shipping.

Kosherland

From the product description: “Travel through KosherTown—pass by Bubby, the Kiddush Ocean, and Matzah Man—but don’t listen to the Latke Men Marching Band or you might get stuck in the honey! Be the first to make it to the kosher home, and you win!” But what if I pass the pig-trotter tortelloni with mustard broth and daikon at Momofuku?

Available at Amazon.com, $9.47 plus shipping.

Hanukkah Harry

Are you secretly jealous of the O’Shaughnessys’ Christmas decorations? The cure for what ails you is a seven-and-a-half foot, menorah-totin’ Jewish snowman perched on a dreidel! What child won’t be thrilled to find this giant creature looming in his front yard? What yearning-to-assimilate teen won’t be mortified to have friends drive past her home this holiday season? Nothing contributes to in-group identification like humiliation!

Available at Hanukkah Harry, $139.95 with free shipping.

Talking Queen Esther Doll

Um, are you sure you won a beauty pageant? Were the other contestants. . .biological women?

Available at Amazon.com, $19.99 plus shipping.

“I get to see it first!” Jonah, who was six, screamed.

“No, me!” Maia, who was two, shrieked.

Jonah could read his electronics catalog by himself, and did so with a strange sort of tenderness, as if learning for the first time of the world’s bounty. “Good news, Dad,” he said, when we went to tuck him in for the night. “Nintendo DS comes with a game bundle, and it’s only $149!” He seemed genuinely glad—not for himself only but for us, that this miracle was possible.

Maia still needed a little help, however. She would sit cross-legged on the floor with her American Girl catalog on her lap and say, “Read!” with that threatening look on her face that presaged an explosion. We would spend what seemed to be interminable, eerie hours reading aloud the text accompanying pictures of scarily vapid, saccharine dolls in period costumes, until we could simply recite the words by heart. Maia would caress the pictures as we spoke, staring with longing as if recalling a long-lost love. Over time, we noticed that there was one picture in particular to which she kept returning: Marisol, a girl in a purple tutu. “Is Marisol the one you want?” we asked.

Maia nodded shyly.

“Then you will get Marisol.”

Maia jumped up and began doing a genuine dance of joy, waving her hands over her head and swaying, her delicate face radiant with pleasure. The price tag: only $87 with a jazzy girl outfit; $26 more for the tutu.

This wasn’t exactly what we had intended. When we’d had our children, we’d wanted to improve upon our own experience, to give them the holiday experience that we now wished we had had. While we had, as a young married couple, celebrated Hanukkah carelessly, whenever we saw fit, we now wanted to know exactly when Hanukkah fell; we wanted to know what the letters on the dreidel meant. Suddenly, as parents, we were the ones who could construct the world that would help our children create their own memories.

Plus, while we had been raised in the cities of Los Angeles and Manhattan, among two of the most concentrated Jewish populations on the globe, our children were being raised in Wilmington, North Carolina, where our son was the only Jewish child in his entire elementary school. During the month of December, houses everywhere became artistic tributes to various forms of Santa; our next-door neighbor had designed a Santa out of potato sacks, plopped him on top of a tractor, and parked this odd creation in front of his house. Our house was the only one on the block that was dark.

We had bought our first menorah at a sale by the Ladies Concordia Society at the Temple of Israel, the Reform temple that we had joined soon after arriving in Wilmington. We had been surprised by the variety of items and tchotchkes on sale. There were menorahs with ceramic sports figures, with Disney characters, and a military one featuring metal replicas of tanks. There were Hanukkah doodads of astounding variety: bags of gelt, but also a bag of jelly beans called “Maccabeans,” a yo-yo with a menorah on it that played “I have a Little Dreidel” when you tossed it, electric dreidels that bounced, kits where you could roll your own beeswax candles, Hanukkah finger puppets, coloring books, and so on. We loaded up. We would create our own version of Hanukkah for our children. But what would it be?

Our Hanukkah would focus not on the presents, which we’d learned was a recent innovation to compete against Christmas, but instead on the story that the holiday was meant to celebrate: the victory of the Maccabees against King Antiochus, who tried to suppress the Jewish religion, and the miracle of the Temple light.

Needless to say, the children had never really cooperated in that venture. It didn’t help matters that Hanukkah is a relatively minor holiday in the Jewish tradition. Yes, a successful revolt, men with spears, a guy named “The Hammer,” but what it all comes down to is oil that lasts longer than expected. Ultimately, that is a tough sell to two children in a small southern city temporarily inundated with images of wise men with camels, drummer boys, talking animals in a manger, a fat man in a red suit who hands out gifts for free, and something they can really identify with: a baby his parents think is God.

Jonah was two when he began to notice the Christmas frenzy going on around him and started throwing tantrums in front of department store windows, having breakdowns at friends’ houses when he saw all the new toys they had scored, and asking confused questions about Santa Claus and where this incredible bounty of bleeping, whirring, flashing goodies came from.

Rather than being an expression of our Jewish identity, Hanukkah very quickly became the thing that would protect us from the evils of Christmas. To an extent it worked: we didn’t have to haul him out of the mall kicking and screaming—or not all the time, anyway—and we didn’t have to worry about him converting to Christianity each December. Every time he saw one of those Santa shows on TV—the kind that seem to function as infomercials for some hidden cabal of toy manufacturers—we could just say, “Forget about Christmas. You get Hanukkah, you lucky dog, and it lasts for eight days instead of just one! Tell that to your little gentile friends!”

Of course, this did not really address the greed problem. If anything, it made it worse; we were essentially signaling to our children that they would find a better rate of return in being Jewish than Christian. So while we were disturbed and frightened by the greed we had unleashed, we were nevertheless captive to it, and telling them once again about the Maccabees was beginning to feel futile. “So you see,” we said, “the greatest miracle of them all was the decision to light the lamp, not knowing whether the oil would last—the miracle of hope.”

“Can I get the enhanced game bundle?” asked Jonah.

“And I want tutu!” said Maia.

“Don’t you understand?” we asked. “If Judah Maccabee hadn’t beaten the Romans, we would be praying to Zeus right now.”

Jonah thought about this. “Does he give toys too?”

This time, we told the children that they would get all their presents on the first night, after dinner and the lighting of the candles. The idea was that taking care of the gift giving right away would leave the rest of the holiday free of greed. After some arguing it was decided that the schedule could be moved up—we would open presents before dinner, though after the candles. . . well, before the candles. . . . It was midafternoon and still light out when they began ripping furiously at the wrapping. It was like watching piranhas feed. We stood by stunned and a little frightened, waiting for the joy that would be our reward.

We moved closer to Maia as she began to unwrap the American Girl doll that she had pointed to in the catalog again and again. Marisol. We had ordered Marisol on December 1, as supplies were limited, and the customer service agent had said that Marisol was on back order but was guaranteed to arrive by December 25, which was now happily the first night of Hanukkah.

“Maia, here’s Marisol,” we said. She lifted Marisol out of the box and placed her on her lap.

There was silence.

“I hate her,” said Maia.

“What?” we asked, realizing, with horror, that she was not wearing the tutu she had worn in the catalog.

“Not right doll!” shrieked Maia and threw the doll across the room.

It did not go well with the Princess Alexa carriage, either, which we opened and found in many pieces, with instructions so complex they might as well have been for a spacecraft. Maia stood by the dissembled pieces and wailed, “Where my carriage?”

Jonah tore open the Nintendo he had been pleading for, which we had once caught him murmuring about in his dreams (“comes with Mario for 149”). He had never seen the thing before, but he was caught in a kind of trance as he instantly found the on button, pushed it, and began playing, as though simply resuming a game that had been interrupted in some past life. “Jonah, do you like it?” we asked him. He stared at the screen, mouth open. We watched, forgotten.

We sat, disappointed by the children’s reactions. Or maybe “disappointed” was not the word—we’d been cheated. We had hoped that our generosity would make our children turn to us with renewed love and faith in the world s goodness. Instead, they’d had the bad manners to either protest or ignore us. What was this? What had happened to the joy of Hanukkah?

The sight of Maia throwing Marisol across a room littered with shredded wrapping paper and other very expensive toys in various states of disassemblage and nonappreciation was shocking enough to lead us to a resolution: we were tired of celebrating Greedikah. The kids would have to learn the true meaning of Hanukkah, even if it killed us (or them). And so we threw ourselves into Hanukkah as a project. Each night, we had a different activity. We made latkes by hand, grating the potatoes, throwing them into the bubbling oil. We went to a friend’s big Hanukkah party—with 50 people, perhaps the largest Hanukkah party in the city.

We tried to tell them the story. “How would you feel,” we asked Jonah at breakfast the next morning, “if someone said you couldn’t play soccer?” He was wide-eyed; we could see that we were reaching him. We tried to think of his version of a holy book. “How would you feel if someone said you couldn’t read Captain Underpants?”

He nodded gravely. “I’d feel really bad if someone said I couldn’t have my Nintendo,”

Was this it? Was it close? “Well, yeah, that’s it. That’s sort of how the Maccabees felt, sort of.”

What was the Hanukkah story, exactly? We read the children’s versions we had bought for them. It had everything, frankly, that children would like. Unfair rules. Rebellion. Battles. Magical fire.

We played up the battle part.

“Then Judah the Maccabee spurred the Jews to take back the Temple!”

We learned the dreidel game and played it with pennies; somehow, Jonah figured out how to twist the dreidel, or turn it, so it landed on gimel and he always won. He exulted, perhaps not unlike Judah the Maccabee.

“I am Jonah the Maccabee, king of dreidels’“ he proclaimed. We talked about the oil. “What if your Nintendo was losing its charge,” we suggested, “but it kept going. And going. For days. It still worked.”

He stared at us; he was listening. We spent a night rolling candles made from strips of beeswax. Jonah and Maia stood still at the table, watching the flames. There was an appealing pyromaniacal aspect to Hanukkah. There was one flame, then two, then three. There was something basic and mesmerizing about the flames, something so superior, we felt, to the gaudy ornamentation of a Christmas tree. The simple spectacle of the row of light. We did not necessarily feel a connection to anything miraculous but, instead, a sort of breathlessness, the understanding that the Maccabees, whoever they were, had watched flames just like this in a ruined temple 2,200 years ago.

The fifth night, Jonah asked if he could light the candles. “He can,” said his grandmother, and we looked at her, aghast—a seven-year-old armed with a shamash, a tiny torch? But Jonah looked as though his own miraculousness had finally been acknowledged. We lit a candle and handed it to him.

We said the prayer, and Jonah slowly, carefully, lit each candle.

“Let’s turn off the lights!” Jonah suggested.

We did. The candles glowed in the darkness.

“Let’s watch them melt,” he said.

We were quiet. The flames rose up, watery, pale, in the dark kitchen. We watched them melt.

Then our son told us the Hanukkah story. He told about the Greeks who told the Jews they would have to worship the Greek gods. “They said, You can’t worship any gods but ours!” he said with gusto, clenching his fist. He described how the great Temple was ruined and how, when the Maccabees entered it, they had only one night of oil. He knew it all. He told the story of what had happened thousands of years ago slowly, like a miniature rabbi. The way he told it, it was a good story. It was the fifth night of Hanukkah. He was seven years old. We sat in the darkness, the light on our faces, and listened to him.

Karen E. Bender is the author of Like Normal People. Her fiction has appeared in magazines including The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope, Ploughshares, and the Harvard Review. Robert Anthony Siegel is the author of the novels All The Money in the World and All Will Be Revealed. They both teach creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, where they live with their two children.

This essay originally appeared in the anthology How to Spell Chanukah, edited by Emily Franklin and published by Algonquin Books.

Illustration by Jenny M.