Our Chanukah traditions: It's a wrap!
Note: The follow sequence happens every year.
On the first night of Chanukah, our house is a showpiece. Menorahs are displayed, gifts are piled high on the dining room table, the air is fragrant with the aroma of fresh latkes. There are dreidels to play with and chocolate gelt to eat. My kids eye the pile of gorgeously wrapped presents with hungry, greedy glee. A virtual feeding frenzy ensues after the candles are lit and they can finally, finally get at those goodies! The bows go flying. It's a full body sport and sometimes there are injuries. Papercut? Shake it off!
Note: Normally my kids treat a papercut like a tragic and possibly fatal wound. But on Chanukah? it's just a well earned battle scar.
After the madness settles and we have located the bolt cutters to extricate the toys from their prison of plastic packaging and shackles of twist ties, the mess is breathtaking. What took hours to package, wrap, label, tie with bows, and stack lovingly on the dining room table took exactly six seconds to dismantle. Faster than frying a latke.
Think we can keep this up for 8 nights in a row? Not a chance. So it's no surprise on the second or third night, that you begin to see less elaborate wrapping jobs. Sometimes you even see a "redo" if, on the first night, some the paper came off in a large swathes without too much tape damage. Like perfectly shelled eggs. Grandparents and other elderly relatives, are great at pouncing on those remnants, knowing we'll want to use them again later. We snort and roll our eyes at their depression era thrift. And then by midweek we scrabble through the recycling bin for those scraps Mema preserved. We like trees. Chanukah wrapping is both hard to find and expensive.








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