I was recently roped I…I mean asked to participate in Canter’s
Chanters Chanukah Extravaganza at my Temple. When it was first
presented to me, I thought, ‘Great, our Canter is a cool guy and is
probably open to doing some improv or something with the kids. That’s
got to be why he’s asking me. This’ll be fun.”
But, no. He griped that the kids were positively incapable of
doing improv and that was why he prevailed on my services as well as
other Temple members who happened to be performers; to write and
perform small vignettes that would be done eight times, as eight groups
were led through the Temple. The motif was to be “You want to know what Chanukah is all about? I’ll tell you what Chanukah’s all about…”
Each group was to represent one aspect of the celebration. My
friend Amy Simon, writer and performer of the wonderful show Cheerios
in My Underpants, volunteered to create some sort of wrap-around to
feature ‘latkes’. She had the run of the Temple kitchen and would be
making real latkes to give to the kids. Her idea was to create a Bubbie
personae.
Dreidels were up for grabs so I decided to take a whack at it. I love games and this is a mindless game much like Yahtzee, only you win pennies or chocolate.
Each holiday season there are new chocolates and I am first in line to try as many as I can. This year there were so many I packed them all up and took them to Thanksgiving dinner to let my friends and family try them too. Here are the highlights:
Ah, so it begins. 
Back in Rhode Island, there was never much to look forward to after Christmas. The holiday decorations came down, it was depressingly dark by 4:30 pm, and that once-fluffy-perfect-for-sledding-snow had turned into treacherous black ice. But there was always panettone.
The last time I made eggnog was in college. It was a recipe from one of the first cookbooks I ever owned, the