Traditional Holiday Stories No. 2

Hanukah and a Lump of Coal

Hanukah is when you light a candle every night for eight nights, and also when you get presents eight times, not once like from the goyim at Christmas, and both are Festivals of Light. But when you are a little kid, the distinctions are not so clear. For me it was especially confusing because by the time I was old enough to know that one day was not the same as another and some were more important than others I was also too little to know what makes a difference. You know what I mean? I mean you and not me.

So let us suppose that this time when days became different and not the same happened in 1943 and the place where it happened was in Brooklyn, New York, more precisely in Boro Park. It had to be then because I remember that my grandfather was still alive and my father was far away fighting the nasty Germans in the Old Country. We were living, that is, my mother and me, in the red brick house of my grandma and grandpa, who were very old and yet I was told that they were the mommy and daddy of my mother, which by itself, you see, could be very confusing. Everybody was who they were with their own names but they were also parents and children to each other. The problem was that my father, who had his own mommy and daddy, who were also my other grandma and grandpa, they lived in different house, the one on Minna Street, which was a long walk across lots of streets and avenues.

Anyway, in the red brick house where we all lived, except for my daddy and my other grandma and grandpa, we came to that special day in the year when Hanukah started, and then every night, before I went to bed, everybody looked at the menorah on the table, and my grandpa Moe, who was not dead yet, lit one candle with a match and then lit another candle with the first candle and said words that were a prayer. After that he gave the first candle to my grandma and she lit a another one, and then my mother, and then—this went on for eight nights—everyone lit another candle until finally there was a night with nine candles, one the special lighting candle and all the other candles, and all of them were different colours, well, some of them were white, some blue, some red and one yellow. A big miracle happened there, everybody said, but I didn’t know what was a miracle, except that it was something important.

This always was a time to say a prayer and afterwards to sing a song and afterwards to sit down to eat dinner and also—and this was my best favourite time—to open little boxes and take out presents. Some presents were really good, like a toy tin soldier, a little black coal-truck or a wind-up yellow duck that waddled around on the floor. Some presents were not so good, like a pair of socks or a pair of handkerchiefs to blow your nose into. What grown-ups got for their presents I can’t remember. 

So some days are different than others and some things better than others. Anyone who gets to three years old should be able to understand that. Other things are very difficult to understand. They don’t make any sense. Like for instance, everybody doesn’t mean everybody. When we gathered around the Hanukah lights, my daddy wasn’t there. Instead, my mother took out an envelope that came from the War, and she read what my father wrote on a little very thin piece of paper. It said, “My dear son, I love you and miss you very much. Be a good boy and help your mother and be a loving grandson to your grandmas and grandpas. I hope I will see you soon. Your loving father, Daddy.” My mother read this letter out, so whatever my father said came out in her voice. My mother showed me the words but they were just neat lines and circles. She cried and said, It would be a real miracle if he came home alive.

So another thing about everybody not meaning everybody was that one person, my father, could be so far away in the war that he wasn’t there, but he could send letters to me. Another bother was that my daddy’s mommy and daddy, my other grandparents, the ones who lived on Minna Street, weren’t there to light the candles. Later I found out that they had their own menorah to light, and they had a table and around the table were their own relatives, who were also mine, like my Aunt Florence, who was my father’s sister and my other aunt, Aunt Helen, who was the wife of my father’s brother, my Uncle Willy, who was also a soldier and fighting in the war and was not home. That’s a lot of people to remember, especially when some of them weren’t there. Aunt Florence’s husband, my Uncle Joe, was a different kind of soldier, a sailor who sailed on boats. I didn’t remember anything about him then. Uncle Willy I remembered just a little. So all these other people who were my relatives lit the Hanukah lights too but in a different house.

Everybody visited everybody but not always at the same time. In a different year, the next one, after my Grandpa Moe was dead, my mother took me to Grandpa Dave and Grandma Ida to light the Hanukah candles. So far as I can remember everything else was the same. But they said, In this crazy world with all that going on over there, it was a miracle we could all light the Hanukah lights together.

Now another thing that was different about the Hanukah lights and presents was that Grandma Molly’s little red brick house was next door to another little red brick house, almost exactly the same.  In this other house was Mrs. Saladino. She was Italian, so she had a Christmas Tree, and she always gave me bowls of slurpy red spaghetti. When I went next door to visit her, she always gave me spaghetti, but a few days after Hanukah, she said I should look under the Christmas Tree and maybe I would find something nice. The tree was really big, taller than I was then, and it had little red and blue and white light-bulbs on a wire and wound around its branches. It also had on its top a little golden person called an angel. So I looked under the tree, and Mrs Saladino pointed to a box with bright paper and ribbons, and said. This is for you because you are a good little boy. So I opened the box and looked inside, and it was a present, a furry little monkey with a hat and cymbals its hand and you could wind it up and the cymbals crashed bam-bam-bam. Then she laughed and said,You like? You are a funny little monkey boy. I laughed too because it was funny that she thought I was a monkey. Then she started to cry and said, When my Angelo was little I give him also a toy monkey. Then he went away in the army and he never gonna come back. Also they took away my man, my Salvatore. She gave me a great big wet kiss. So she took out a big handkerchief, blew her nose and said, Let’s have a nice bowl of spaghetti, alright?

When I went home and we were at the table for dinner, I said to everybody there, I want to have a Christmas Tree and get a present just like the next door lady. My mother looked at me and said, We don’t make Christmas and we had our Hanukah and you got a lot of presents. I don’t care, I said. I want to have a Christmas too. Then my grandma said, Why do you want to be like those people? Then my grandpa said, You want a Christmas present? Ok, then hang up a stocking and tomorrow morning see what is in it. I decided that a stocking was like a Christmas Tree. Well, the next morning I got up and looked at the stocking stuck on the wall with nail, and there was something inside it. So I pushed over a chair, climbed up, and reached over and pulled the stocking off the wall. It fell down. Then I climbed down from the chair and sat on the floor and looked into the stocking. It was a little black lump of coal. When I looked around, there was everybody standing around and looking down at me. This was my grandpa, my grandma and my mother. I started to cry. They all laughed at me.

Later I was very sad so I went next door to see Mrs. Saladino and told her what happened. I wanted to ask her why nobody was ever at home with her, if there was a Mr. Saladino and why her son Angelo would not come back from the war. She gave me a bowl of red slurpy spaghetti. You a big boy now, she said. Don’t be sad. You family just want you to know what your holiday is just as good as mine. It hurt them when you want to make also Christmas. It’s a lot of bad things in this world and they get very sad. Me too. But you can come here and sit under my tree and be my monkey. I got nobody else now.