Trust the Jewish calendar to mess everything up.
I am used to explaining that Jewish festivals are based around the lunar year and therefore move about a bit. People tend to be broadly OK with this – especially if it leads us into the fascinating realms of why Christmas is on the same date each year, but Easter shifts so Good Friday is always on an actual Friday, anywhere from late March to the end of April.
It all gets a bit more complicated when you add in the concept of a “leap month”. The lunar year of 12 lunar months is around 11 days shorter than the solar year. Keep going that way for too long and everything gets distressingly out of sync. So every so often, Jews just add an extra month, which is very convenient for making the calendars line up but causes mayhem for everything else.
And thus Chanukah, which usually takes place somewhere between late November and mid-December, so all eight nights are done and dusted before schools go on holiday, begins this year on Christmas Day. The final night will be New Year’s Eve.
Once upon a time, the delay would have made this time of year feel horribly empty, for me at least. Raised in a family that very emphatically didn’t do Christmas, eight nights of candle lighting and latkes helped ward off the cold December feeling that the rest of the world spent a full month fixated on something we had no part of.
Having “married into Christmas”, as I like to put it, it hits differently. This is my fifth year celebrating something I spent my childhood on the outside looking in on. Five years since my first ever Christmas tree – artificial, of course, so the cat doesn’t poison herself on pine needles – although only the fourth time that tree has been set up and decorated. Last year we were in between homes, living out of boxes as the Disaster House was torn apart and rebuilt into a liveable state. This is our first festive season in what we hope will be our forever home. The tree stands in the entrance the kitchen my husband, who has more cookbooks than sense, renovated the entire house around. The baubles collected over the past few years tell a story: the blue glass with the sparkling Chanukah menorah, to mark the first time we attempted to blend the festivals; dried flowers from my wedding bouquet, exquisitely transformed into a Christmas ornament by one of our quick-thinking guests; high-end trinkets picked up for pennies in last year’s January sale, when we went to John Lewis to buy lighting fixtures for the new house and had to entertain two bored six-year-olds.
A year older, those children have embraced the festive spirit by learning Ding Dong! Merrily On High and belting out the refrain on repeat for what feels like hours at a time. (“She knows how to start singing Gloria, but she doesn’t know how you stop.”) Christmas carols have featured a lot, in fact. We’ve been playing Handel’s Messiah, which takes me back to being 14 and just making it into the school choir. My husband, the erstwhile choral scholar, casually dropped into the conversation over breakfast one morning that the soloist on a rendition of In The Bleak Midwinter from 1998 played on Classic FM is in fact him. I tweeted Classic FM to ask for evidence. No reply so far, so it’s possible he’s made the whole thing up. This year he’s taking me to Midnight Mass at St Bartholomew the Great Church in Smithfield on Christmas Eve. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a church service that wasn’t a wedding. He has assured me neither myself nor the building are likely to spontaneously combust when I walk through the doors, but we’ll see.
As for Christmas itself, the nice thing about mixed-faith relationships is never needing to argue about where we spend it – although I’ll be bringing a menorah to my in-laws’ house, so we can light the candles together too. After all, there’s nothing in the Jewish Bible forbidding turkey at Chanukah. My stepdaughters will teach their aunts and uncles the Hebrew songs they’ve picked up over the years. Then it’s back to London for the annual 40-person extravaganza that is family Chanukah. Only this year, because of the damn calendar, so many cousins are travelling back from Christmases with their non-Jewish partners that the role of making potato latkes for everyone will fall almost entirely to us. And by us, I mean my husband (he of more cookbooks than sense). In an alarmingly short space of time he has morphed from a slightly awkward and overwhelmed guest at Cunliffe family Jewish festivities to chief caterer. At least he has the kitchen for it.
It would be less of a scramble without the leap month. Part of me worries Chanukah will get lost in the children’s minds this month, elided with Christmas which – with two households, two celebrations – is already overwhelming. And I so desperately wanted to see the Chanukah candles lit in Westminster Hall. Last year was the first time the Jewish festival was marked in Parliament, in the wake of the fear and misery after 7 October. I missed it, left off an email list and only turning up once it was all over, the candles burning beneath the huge Christmas tree that was still dwarfed by the cavernous, ancient space. When they repeated the event a few weeks ago, there were no candles – it was held too early, by necessity, Chanukah itself falling after Parliament rises for recess.
Still, it was beautiful, with words from the Chief Rabbi and representatives from across the political spectrum. I spotted my own Rabbi in the audience, the man who conducted my Bat Mitzvah more than two decades ago, who led me and my mother across the Pyrenees when I was 17, retracing the Le Chemin de la Liberte, the route Jews took to escape Nazi-occupied France into Spain. A klezmer band called Shir played Chanukah songs that echoed throughout Westminster Hall. I took a video and sent it to my mother; it turns out she knows the guitarist. Of course she does.
I wish I’d been able to see them light the candles. But then, there is always next year – it has been announced that Parliament’s Chanukah celebration will now be an annual event, a new tradition born out of tragedy, and the calendar is back to normal in 2025. It won’t just be my husband making latkes. I won’t have to bring candles to Christmas. No doubt we’ll acquire more baubles. As he’s taking me to church, perhaps I’ll take him to synagogue, and see how much of the Hebrew words the Rabbi taught me I can remember. Maybe I can teach my stepdaughters. Maybe by then they’ll have worked out how to stop singing Gloria.
[See also: The reality of Ireland’s anti-Israel stance]
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