My Mazel

Just my mazel.

We are under a freaking blizzard warning until 6 pm tomorrow. Which totally wouldn't matter to me in the least, except, of course, that I need to be at the hospital at 8 am for surgery.

Shit. Drek.

I'm hoping that my intrepid husband will get me there, and experience tells me that he will. However, I reserve the right to stress over this until I see that the doctor and his entire team are there, too. Sadly, they cannot really on the Hubs for transportation.

I'll let you know.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

It's Thursday

I cannot possibly get everything I need to get done by Monday done. And yet, I suppose I will. And what doesn't get done doesn't. Que sera, etc.

Tomorrow I will be cooking and/or setting up all day for the evening's Christmas Eve meal, at which we will be joined by R's new in-laws. Folks, I have a weeny little house, but I do have a nice new table and chairs, and a whole mess of Fiesta Ware, so it will be what it is. My daughter the gourmet helped set up the menu, but I am making all of it. Cute, eh? Never mind. It's a very Italian-themed meal, and I think it'll be fun to make. I just have to keep out of my own way.

Christmas itself will be a whole new thing this year. My own ILs are in their new place, it's only 20 minutes away, and none of us are cooking, we'll be eating in a private room at one of the on-site restaurants. We could be home before dark.

Christmas will be over the second we get home, and I will go right into prep for surgery mode. Not only will I be on a liquid diet all day Sunday, I'll be getting things ready for when I get home, like moving my computer to where I'll be lying down, putting crutches nearby in case I need help getting up, getting my pj-type wear where it'll all be convenient for other people to grab it for me, like that. All of my laundry will be done and put away before I leave for the hospital.

I'm not so much nervous about the surgery as I am about the unknown aftermath, diet and strength and so on. Tonight, the Sibs and I are going to test our Skype connection, since she's still housebound with her broken leg for a few weeks. I know Skype's been down, but like everything else, what is is, and I'll see how it goes.

As for me, I'm going to make another cheese sandwich on Wonder Bread, nectar of the freaking gods. I've been eating lately as if each thing I eat is for the last time, which could be. More likely, not for a long time. They told me at the surgeon's office that I won't be able to eat meat for maybe a year. Now, I could care less about steak, so it didn't sound so bad at first. And then I thought: what about a BLT? (On white toast, with swiss cheese and mayo on the side, please.) No bacon? And no sweets, they tell me? What else won't I be able to eat forever?

Ok, sandwich. I probably won't post till after the surgery, but I'll get K to post a "Mom's okay" if I can.

So.

So here's what's new:

My surgery has been moved up to December 27 because the surgeon had a cancellation. That means I can get it done sooner than later, and not on next year's insurance with the deductible all in one chunk in January. Cool. The downside is that this is just over two weeks away (!), in which time I have to Christmas up the house, have Christmas Eve dinner here with R's in-laws, go to my own in-laws' new place on Christmas, then go on a liquid diet for a day, and then there we are. Before I go to the hospital, I want everything set up here so I don't have to have other people move things for me (like my computer) when I get back. I expect that I will be taking the tree down in April or thereabouts.

My sister broke her leg the other day. Actually, I think she broke the same bone in her knee that I broke four years ago, but worse. She's immobilized, and according to her doctor, in bed for four to six weeks. So, her keeping me company during my recuperation is out. As is her making me her boffo rice pudding when I'm up to grainy food. I'm guessing we will actually not see each other for several weeks, being both house-ridden, and even when I can go out, I'm unlikely to make it up her narrow, steep staircase to the second floor right away, and she can't come down. Interesting. I should investigate the whole webcam thing before the surgery, eh? We both have Macs with webcams, so I guess it can be done.

We are all about minimizing Christmas this year, and I think we will continue to do so. Not that we ever do it up big, but this year, almost all gifts are gift-cards and the like; there's practically nothing to wrap, and I'm wrapping what I have in handkerchiefs and scarves, no paper. But the tree will go up, and it will be decorated. I like that a lot. I'm going to put my small tree with the mini-ornaments in the family room this year, too, so I can enjoy that. (Before the surgery, and for a while after, apparently.)

Yet tomorrow at the crack of 7:00 am, I'm hitting a few stores before that get jammed because I have a handful of terrific coupons, and I realized earlier today that all the yoga pants I sleep in have holes and exposed elastic, which will not be so cozy for the recuperation time. I'll see what I can do. It looks like I have enough Kohl's coupons and offers to get what I need and have them pay me.

A Tale of Two ... Three Menorahs

So as it turns out, I have three menorahs. I thought I had two, but when I was looking this morning for the one I wanted to light, I have three.


The one on the left, the brass one, is one that I bought about twenty years ago because I thought it would be nice to have a menorah that I liked, that I picked out, which I had never had before. It's the one I light every year. The one on the right in the picture has a story.

My Grandpa Sam was an Orthodox Jew, but he compromised on a lot of the details over the years because he was poor. If he had to work on Saturday, well then he prayed for forgiveness and he was sure that G-d forgave him. (In the context of my grandfather, I'll use the Jewish convention for putting the name of the Almighty into print.) I was told that when my mother was a child, her mother lit the Sabbath candles on Friday nights, but I never saw her do that, and I never saw my grandparents light a menorah on Chanukah, but I think that was because they always came to visit us on Chanukah and helped light ours. I assume they had one, but since I was never in their home when it came out, who knows?

In 1970, a young man in the Soviet Union petitioned his government for the right to emigrate to Israel, and was turned down. Following that, he refused to accept this decision and was deported to Israel (?) and he later came to New York and staged a hunger strike outside the United Nations to try to get his family released as well. He was the first "refusenik", as these Russian-Jewish would-be emigrants were called; his Russian name was Yaakov Kazakov. He was my grandmother's nephew -- her sister's grandson, actually -- and when he came to New York, he brought this menorah from Israel as a gift to my grandparents.

My grandmother, as she did with any nice things she had, wrapped it up and put it away "for later." She gave it to me, unused, when I got married, and so it was the menorah I had and lit every year until I got the brass one. It's in an Israeli-art style that I never liked, and although I liked the story (and Yaakov, whom I met, and his grandmother Sonia, when she later came to visit from Israel), I just didn't care for this menorah. But my kids loved it, it was our menorah, it came from my grandmother, we HAD to use it every year! So some years, I lit both.

I didn't even remember that I had the little one in front, the third one. I'm guessing it must have belonged to my parents, although it's not the one we lit when I was a kid. That was a cheap tin menorah, with all the candleholders loose, but it was the same shape and format as this one (but not in the Israeli enameled style.) This must have been the menorah my mother wanted, and bought after we grew up.


I have so many boxes of candles because I buy a box every year but I never remember to light the menorah each night for eight nights, so I have extra. This year I'm using the nice beeswax ones on the upper right. I've never used beeswax before. The candles are lit at sunset, the center one first each night, and then that one is used to light the others, one the first night, two the second night, and so on. The candles melt down and burn out in a half hour or so; they're one-use-only.

I found this paper today, too; I didn't realize I had it. Despite her father's Orthodoxy, my mother wasn't raised that way; anyway, girls didn't go to Hebrew school or have Bat Mitzvahs in her day. So when she lit the candles every year, she had to read the prayer, and this is the cheat-sheet she read it from. I'm sure she had this before I was born, and I saw it in her hands -- later in mine -- every Chanukah of my childhood. We have always read aloud the transliterated Hebrew prayer, which is to say, it sounds like Hebrew, but we read it in English, like this:

Bo-ruch atoh a-do-noy, e-lo-he-nu me-lech ho-o-lom ...

Do I still read it when I light the candles? I do. I don't do it because I believe in G-d so much as I do it because I believe in the history and traditions of the people of whom I am one. The English translation appears below the Hebrew on the page:

Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, King of the universe, who has sanctified us by thy commandments, and has commanded us to kindle the lights of Chanukah.

Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, King of the universe, who wroughtest miracles for our fathers in days of old, at this season.