The Truth About My Bat Mitzvah Read Free Page B

had Hanukkah. I made decorations in class at the JCC and my mother hung them up around the house. I learnedwhat the letters on a dreidel meant. Of course, it helped when Hanukkah and Christmas came around the same time, but I remember one year when Hanukkah came right after Thanksgiving.
    â€œIt’s tonight,” I told my mother.
    â€œNo, it can’t be,” she said.
    I was in public school by then. Rachel and I were in different classes that year, so it must have been second grade. There were only two Jewish kids in my room, Kate Nemerofsky and Danny Schiffman. They had been talking about it all day, talking about what presents they were getting. What they were going to eat. The teacher let them go to the front of the room and explain the Hanukkah story to the whole class.
    I may have been only seven, but I still thought they were making way too big a deal out of it. Lighting candles and eating latkas—even spinning a dreidel was nothing compared to going to bed, too excited to even lie down, then somehow falling asleep, waking up way before you were supposed to, and running downstairs in your pajamas to a magical pile of presents that hadn’t been there the night before.
    But still, being half and half, I should have at least known it was Hanukkah.
    â€œNo, Mom.” I insisted. “It’s tonight. Tonight is the first night.”
    My mother is a doctor and she’s not home a lot. She works all week and some weekends she’s on call, so she’s not home then, either. She works really hard and she saves people’s lives, so I didn’t blame her. Hanukkah just kind of crept up on us that year. She checked the Hadassah calendar we get every year because my parents give them money. I was right. It was tonight.
    â€œOkay. Well, I’ll get the menorah down from the attic,” she said. But she looked tired. It was after eight o’clock and she had just gotten home from the hospital. She hadn’t even eaten dinner yet.
    â€œIt’s okay, Mom. There are seven more nights,” I said.
    Sam was just a baby then. He didn’t even notice. I think we lit the menorah three, maybe four nights that year, and that’s probably when Hanukkah started to peter out in our house. Half and half became seventy-five/twenty-five. Then more like eighty/twenty.
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    But the truth was, what I had really meant to say was, It’s okay, Mom. There’s seven more nights. As long as you don’t forget Christmas.
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    But how could anyone forget Christmas?
    It was all around us, everywhere, and it began early. The local stores had red and green decorations up so early, it was almost as if they had never come down from the year before. TV commercials with Santa Claus and Christmas trees started pretty much right after Halloween. At the grocery store and the pharmacy and everywhere you went, people said “Merry Christmas” instead of good-bye. So if you didn’t want to correct everyone every time, you just got used to it.
    The principal at our school played holiday music over the announcements in the morning for the entire month of December. They weren’t religious, but everyone knew they were Christmas songs. The tinsel was so sparkly and the lights were so pretty. My favorites were the houses with one single white light in every window.
    But most of all, everyone celebrated it, talked about it, waited for it.
    Everyone except Kate Nemerofsky. Danny Schiffman.
    And my best friend, Rachel Miller, who not only celebrated Hanukkah but also Passover, and Rosh Hashanah, and some other holidays I didn’t know anything about.

6
    It’s My Birthright to Play Hooky
    Tomorrow, according to Rachel, is Yom Kippur.
    I found out this particular bit of information on the phone. I wanted to borrow a book she had for a report I needed to do in social studies.
    â€œSorry, Caroline. I’m not going to school tomorrow,” Rachel told me.
    â€œYou’re