Happy Hanukkah - enjoy!

Back atcha, applicable peeps! :) We're outta candles, so one will have to suffice. We're such slackers.

Happy Hanukkah to those who celebrate!

My friend has a menorah magnet on her fridge (nobody in her family is Jewish, I forget the convoluted tale that explains what it's doing there...). When am I supposed to add the individual candle-magnets? Should I have one or two on it tonight? I ask because my calendar says Hanukkah started yesterday at sundown, but wikipedia says that Hanukkah ends on the 12th. So I'm rather confused, but I want to respect the fridge, who I assume is Jewish.

I'm pretty sure my fridge is agnostic, so it's not being very helpful in this endeavor.

Are there eight or nine places? If nine, one is for the shamash which lights the others.

There are nine lights on the menorah - but one of the lights (usually the middle light or the one with the highest holder) doesn't really count as a Hanukkah light - it's the light you light to light the other lights, I think. So on the first night, you light the shamash, then use it to light the first light - that's two lights. Each day you light one more till all 8 (9 really) are lit.

I don't know why Wikipedia is listing Hanukkkah as being 9 nights long - I'm not Jewish, but I have some Jewish friends.

MyJewishLearning.com is full of Hanukkah information, including an exceedingly irreverent episode of "The Adventures of Todd and God" featuring candle-lighting lessons. Here is your candle schedule.

I particularly like the significance of the first-night blessing, which essentially expresses thanks that we've all made it through another year alive and are here to celebrate again. Every holiday should start that way.

And hey, everybody loves latkes. That's lat-KUHS, not this revisionist "lat-keys" (where on earth did that come from?)

I just gave a holiday history tour to some 6-year-olds. Here in New England, a lot of kids are really not literate with Judaism unless they're from a larger city. Therefore, at the end of the tour, while recapping everything they'd seen, I asked what holiday they'd seen being celebrated in one of the houses and heard back "Harmonica."