The Circle: Chranukah

A clever and talented perfume maker and blogger, Roxana of Illuminated Perfume, asked me to participate in a holiday round robin Advent-ure. For each day of the Christian Advent, a different blogger creates their own little post about scent and its relationship to the experience of the holiday season. If you enjoy my post, check out the links above to read all the posts in this series!

We are a blended tradition family who celebrate the Christmas of my Episcopalian childhood with the Chanukah of my husband's faith, in a season that we now refer to in our household as Chranukah. Time has smoothed the blend, and I can now sing the Hebrew blessings as artfully as my husband hangs outdoor lights of blue and white, but it wasn't always that way.

In our first holiday season together in one household, it became painfully obvious that the plethora of Christmas decoration swallowed up our menorah, the carols hogged the airwaves, and the cookies, candies, and cakes were like painted harlots vying for attention with a singular plate of latkes. My husband and his sons were woefully uncomfortable.

Our new kitten, aptly named Loca, created the comic relief that smoothed over our tension by perpetually stealing baby Jesus from our nativity scene and leaving Him to be found under pillows, in a shoe, or under a chair. One day Baby Jesus went missing, not to be found, and we had a whole Christmas with a manger scene that lacked Jesus.

The next spring, while tending to the new growth in our gardens, my husband burst into the house, holding the tiny sewn figure, and exclaimed "I found Jesus!" My daughter and I laughed ourselves silly! "Don't tell your mother!" "Don't tell my mother what?" "Don't tell your mother that you found Jesus! She'll think we've converted you!"

This story is told every year as we hang ornaments, and put our nativity scene under the tree. We now eat gingerbread Star of David cookies, and send batches to my in-laws who love them. I've become a great latke chef, and make homemade applesauce, so those smells now evoke our holiday memories: gingerbread, fresh and pungent applesauce, steaming plates of latkes. And Baby Jesus still maintains a slightly earthy scent. What we are all celebrating is not really so different, or so it seems to me. Hope. Miracles. The light that comes into the world and our hearts and cannot be extinguished.