Holi-daze and Words to the Wide

When I was a child, I could not wait for the holidays.

It was a time of no school with no homework or other assignments, so unlike modern times. In my house it was one of the only times of the year when we actually got to spend “family time” all together. Provided my mother was well and not undergoing some sort of cancer treatment at some hospital somewhere. This did occur frequently, but for some reason did not seem to happen during this particular holiday. Was that divine intervention, careful planning or dumb luck, who could say? This may be the reason that I have so many issues that most times it seems like I have multiple lifetime subscriptions instead.

Hanukkah was celebrated with gusto at our hovel. It was celebrated with home cooked stew and latkes, and jelly donuts and mini menorahs lit for each child. We had our big presents on the first night and other little ones on some of the other seven evenings that followed. My dad really tried hard to be home for most of those. We also got to celebrate the birth of baby Jesus and the workshop at the North Pole due to extended family of other religions.

But, as a child, I never truly appreciated the hard work and effort that went into creating, hosting and cleaning up a holiday extravaganza.

Seeing as how I have been with my wife for decades upon decades since childhood (she was 15 and I was 17 when we met), she tends to try to keep these traditions alive. Last year I bought her a Crockpot for the holiday meal preparations, which according to the salesperson, should have spewed cash on our countertop by now. She said that it “would start paying for itself within the year." We try to have family and friends and co-workers and neighbors over to celebrate the holiday happiness and leave the “Holi-daze” behind, if only for one night.

This is not easy these days, with family spread out all over New York and some of our people doing jobs that make them work on those evenings to get everyone together for a holiday meal. With my current diet put on hiatus this time of the year, my wife’s advice about eating is more like “words to the wide”. I balloon up so much at this time of the year, because of home cooking and over cooking, that Macy’s wants to tie strings to my torso and appendages and use me as an inflated float near Snoopy and Underdog.

My wife especially loves to have kids over. The littler, the betterer! We read the story of the Hanukkah oil miracle. We play “Pin the shamus on the menorah” and “Chanukah Symbol Twister” (right hand equals Blue Star of David). Of course, a rousing game of ”Indian Casino Dreidel", using poker chips to bet with.

You would figure that after all these years that I would remember the rules for dreidel, but because it is not a professional sport I tend to forget. Forgetting things lately has become quite a habit at this time of year, probably due to exhaustion and not an advancement in agedness.

I recently walked into a room and forgot why I was there, but seeing as how it was a bathroom, it greatly narrowed my choices. So after being there and scratching my head until my brain rebooted, then CHA-CHING! I remembered.  I grabbed the q-tips so the kids could use them to make watercolor paintings using holiday stencils. But no matter what day Chanukah falls out on, on the morning of Dec. 25, we also will look at our stockings, hung by the fireplace chimney with care, and look at the half eaten sugar cookies and half-drunk egg nog and my wife will blame it on the stirrings of a little mouse.