The Eight Nights of Thanukah Left Overs*

What's better than turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing and gravy, green bean casserole, yams and pumpkin pie ala mode? All of that with latkes, matzo ball soup, and kugel for appetizers! But, of course Thanksgiving is about more than just cooking and cleaning all day sipping hard cider and slugging down eggnog...

...It's about watching your brother-in-law read the Hebrew prayers off a paper, before ignoring your request to for the family to participate in a round of Shalom Chaverim. I may be a shiksa, but even the rabbi at the Chabad let me shake the lulav. Hey, anyone can misplace their yarmulke three Thanukahs in a row. No matter. At our crib there's pickles and olives to load up on before heart-attack-inducing cornbread rolls break into song, as the hypertension gravy train rattles through town bestowing oodles of stress and gravy across the plates of generations of Feingolds.



Not only did Stop and Shop cease carrying Chanukah candles, (although they carry shabbos candles so clearly there are in fact people who celebrate shabbat in Dennis), but Christmas Tree Shop banished their half a dozen menorahs to the Jewish part of the Cape, Hyann-witz. No dreidels within 30 miles of here, but Tedesci's made sure to stock up on Jewish gelt, which I think tastes a lot better than Catholic guilt, which my family always made sure to have plenty of. (They were Roman Catholic on the Jewish side, my grandmother spoke to me in Yiddish when no one was around.) I do love my Jewish family by marriage, despite them hiding out in the kitchen confessing to me that my son is the perfect example of why they don't like children. Everyone's a comedian.

I cooked, cleaned the walls and all the molding over the house, and almost pulled off a Donna Reed, until an abandoned upstairs bedroom was discovered accidentally during a game of Walkie Talkie hide and seek When the room was seen in all its glory, across between an exploded laundromat and an episode of Hoarders, but without the petrified cats. Ah, the shame. The shame. On the bright side, I discovered that my husband makes a mean matzo ball soup, which will come in handy the day I can't swallow anything that my gums can't smack together.

*According to Chabad.org, you won't have the first evening of Chanukah and Thanksgiving fall on the same night until 2070, provided the Hebrew calendar continues on its 19-year cycle, the US continues to go by the Gregorian calendar, and folks continue to celebrate Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November.