Hanukkah's A Comin': Check Your Local Listings

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Hanukkah's A Comin': Check Your Local Listings
November 19, 2008
Holidays (5 comments)

By JanetheWriter
With more than a week to go until Thanksgiving, we're already well into the incessant advertisements for Barbies, Chia Pets, Pictionary, Scrabble, and, of course, the seasonally popular Norelco electric razors. (Can you even buy one of those things in July?!) Our mailboxes are stuffed with catalogs, catalogs and more catalogs -- Lands' End, L.L Bean, Harry and David and the Vermont Country Store -- and soon enough, we won't be able to escape endless refrains of those silver bells, the chestnuts roasting or the I'll be homes...if only in my dreams.

Against this backdrop, I was thrilled to get an email from Craig 'n Co. letting me know that Lights! Celebrate Hanukkah Live in Concert will air on PBS this December. Undaunted that the concert will air as a pledge drive special (more popularly known as a "beg-a-thon"), I checked my local listings and have marked my calendar for Tuesday, December 2 at 8 p.m. which is when the concert will air on WLIW-TV Channel 21, the Long Island PBS station.

Thanks, Bing, but I'll take Josh Nelson, Mare Winningham, the Klezmatics and the rest of the gang doing "Light One Candle," "Hanerot Halalu," "Maoz Tzur," and more over your holiday classic any day.

Chag sameach!

Tags: Chanukah, Music

Comment

Comments

Larry Kaufman said:

In December of 1947 -- post UN vote to partition Palestine between the Jews and the Arabs (we didn't know then from Palestinians) but before the state of Israel came into being -- I was asked to write a couple of songs for the faculty Chanukah party at the Euclid Avenue Temple in Cleveland. One of the two I turned in is completely forgotten, but I still remember

I'm dreaming of a green eretz,
just like King David used to know,
Where the Negev's bloom
Dispels the gloom
That started two thousand years ago.....

My supervisor, the head of the Hebrew department, was nervous about what Rabbi Brickner would think of our singing something to a Christmas melody, albeit by the Jewish Irving Berlin, but she ran off mimeographed copies, we all sang it, and the rabbi loved it.

So that's a bright side story to the cloying of the silver bells and the not so silent nignts. Macy's here in Chicago (fka Marshall Fields) had Christmas decorations up before Halloween. Three cheers for Nordstrom's, where they don't go up until the day after Thanksgiving!

November 19, 2008 4:54 PM

Gardening Grandma said:

Jane,
Have I got a site for you (and all your readers...)! When you get a catalog you don't want, don't throw it away without first going to https://www.catalogchoice.org/

It's a free service that lets you let the company know you no longer wish to receive the catalog. I've yet to find a company that is not in their directory.

November 19, 2008 7:40 PM

M. B. said:

Today, we are planning the menu for Thanksgiving, deciding who will bake the chocolate pecan pie and who will bake the pumpkin pie, who will bring which family recipe casarole, and how big a turkey to roast with kids home from college. So even though Hanuka is another of the most important holidays, the one that most kids and many adults enjoy the most, I hesitate to focus on it til after Thanksgiving. We want to savor Thanksgiving. Especially when Hanuka come late in December, like this year when it laps over Christmas. We decided to wait til the day after Thanksgiving to put all the Hanuka lights up on the house and in the trees in the yard and to decorate the inside of our home. It is understandable in a year of recession, that merchants are desperate to get everyone in the mood to go Christmas or Hanuka shopping as early as possible, putting up decorations earlier than ever. For many of them, it is a matter of survival. But for us, it's still time to pause to count our blessings before the Hanuka season begins.

November 23, 2008 7:55 PM

M. B. said:

Hanuka is in the air. Two toy soldiers, 4 feet tall in their bright uniforms stand guard by our front door. Behind them are strings of twinkling, multi-colored Italian lights cascading down. A festive, homemade wreath hangs on the door with little draidels, tiny wrapped gift boxes, stars of David, pine cones, berries and two golden angles. Lights decorate the trees and the house, as our neighbors decorate their homes up and down the street for the Festival of Lights and Christmas. Some people are a little slower than others in decorating for the season, but in a few more days, it will be time to ride around and look at some of the most spectacular light displays. Inside we will put fresh evergreen on the banisters and around the fire place where the little scene with Macabees battling Assyrians for the freedom to practice their religion is set up. The aroma is wonderful. There is a homemade electric menorah with bubbling colored candles in the den that has been passed down from my Grandmother, who also made the draidel decorations at a time when store bought decorations were hard to come by.

Our new puppy is only 8 months old, so this is all new to him. When we walk the dogs, he wanted to investigate all the decorations that have suddenly appeared on the homes in the neighborhood. He was especially amused by the reindeer on a few of the yard, but when he found out they weren't real, went back to looking for squirrels and rabbits to chase.

The kids have started thinking about what gifts they want for Hanuka, dropping hints as we walk through the mall or see ads on TV.

We have gotten out some of our favorite Hanuka music, some jazz versions of Hanuka songs and one album by Marc Cohn who does a Rock of Ages that can send chills down your spine. We could use a few more songs like that!

We are well on our way to the happiest of American Jewish holidays.

December 3, 2008 6:52 PM

M. B. said:

The PBS "Lights! Celebrate" show was a real disappointment. Dull, dark, amaturish, with poor music and dance performance. Two thumbs down from our home reviews.

December 7, 2008 8:59 PM