Happy Hanukkah!
Happy Hanukkah to my Jewish friends. I fondly remember the latkes and jelly doughnuts my roommates received for the holiday at college. [Their grandmothers were afraid they wouldn’t celebrate or couldn’t get “real” food at that terrible Baptist university.] It was a great break.
One of the nice things about Hanukkah is that there are established “gifts”, so you don’t have to rack your brains about what to get: a card and gelt covers just about everyone.
General background at Wikipedia’s entry for Hanukkah and even more at Chabad’s Chanukah page.
[Note: on the Jewish calendar the day changes at sunset, not midnight, so the celebration begins then.]
2 comments
Happy Hanukkah, Bryan!
Many of my friends and colleagues (especially musicians) are Jewish, and I lived with a Jewish woman in grad school. When I saw that Mozilla Lightning, the calendar add-on for Thunderbird, has a Jewish calendar among its dozens of calendars available (like the add-on itself) for free, I thought, “Ah… a chance for me to learn more about Judaism.”
Well, yes, it was, and I do keep it installed… but disabled. It is almost literally true that every single date has some commemorative event on it, not just the major holy days. Having that much (forgive me) clutter on my daily calendar was just too much!
When I was scheduling in law enforcement it was a nightmare trying to keep up with the holidays observed by the various officers, especially those that used other calendars. We had two personal days that were used to cover religious holidays and they bounced around. You try to accommodate people, but keeping minimum manning in a 24/7 environment makes it a challenge.
You try not to have observant Jews or Muslims on the 3 to 11 shift because they need both Friday and Saturday off every week, and that creates tensions. Other religions have other requirements, so none of them is easy.
It was a lot easier in the military as you worked your assigned shift unless you used vacation time that was approved in advance.
That calendar system sounds like a much better deal than having to buy the various calendars every year, which didn’t start in January in most cases.