Hanukkah Throwback: Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins
By Sala Levin
When you're a child, Hanukkah is truly the most wonderful time of the year. There's something magical about watching the multi-colored candles add up night after night, about your family stumbling their way through songs whose words no one can entirely remember, even about the gold-wrapped gelt that you gobbled down despite the fact that they tasted vaguely of plastic. Sometimes it snows, and those are the best years: when you come into the kitchen, your boots trailing snow, to hear latkes sizzling in hot oil and to see a present, neatly wrapped in blue and white paper, sitting at your spot on the table.
But then the teenage years come, and then the dreaded adulthood, and Hanukkah is pedestrian, dull--almost, it seems, irrelevant. No one bothers to grate potatoes for latkes anymore--tradition traded...