Our favorite issues: Candles fend off the winter darkness

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We requested Montreal Gazette reporters, editors and photographers to every counsel one native factor — be it an object or an expertise — you can supply this vacation season. See each choose right here.

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It’s exhausting to not love a vacation that has mild as its central image — particularly one celebrated throughout winter’s darkest and shortest days. So it’s with Hanukkah, considered one of my favorite holidays.

Like all Jewish festivals, Hanukkah is a continuing on the Hebrew lunar calendar: The eight-day pageant begins at sunset on the 18th day of the Hebrew month of Kislev; on the photo voltaic Gregorian calendar, it often falls in November or December. This yr, Hanukkah started at sunset on Dec. 18 — and ends the evening of Dec. 25.

Though some consider Hanukkah as a form of Jewish Christmas, the vacations are essentially totally different. Christmas celebrates the beginning of Christianity. Hanukkah celebrates Jewish id and remembers one of many earliest recorded situations of individuals combating for freedom from non secular tyranny. In the course of the second century BC, a small band of fighters rebelled towards forces of the Greek-Syrian ruler who threatened Jewish non secular expression.

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The Maccabees, as they had been recognized, reclaimed the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, which had been defiled, and ready to rededicate it. Hanukkah commemorates that rededication. Because the story goes, they discovered sufficient sanctified olive oil to maintain the lamp within the sanctuary burning for just one evening. It burned for eight days; to believers, that was a miracle.

Hanukkah’s major ritual is the lighting of a candelabrum often called a Hanukkah menorah, or hanukkiah — one further mild for every evening. By the ultimate evening, it glows so brightly it seems nearly ablaze. Certainly, Hanukkah can be referred to as the Competition of Lights.

Household and pals collect to kindle the hanukkiah and eat savoury fritters or doughnuts fried in oil in a nod to the miracle and change small presents. What’s to not love?

sschwartz@postmedia.com

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