Insane Weather & Hanukkah

Between this post and yesterdays, I have finally learned how to spell Hanukkah! ... or at least one of its billion variations.

Today was a very long day. I was at school from 9am until 3pm, spending the majority of that time working on my assessment for creative toolkit - I did the layout and styles for my prelim pages, including the table of contents, finished up the styles in my first chapter, and, for the eighth friggin time, redid my cover. I wasn't going to, because I was (am) sick of fiddling with it and redoing it over and over, and the fact that my (nonexistent) photoshop skills simply cannot match what I see in my head. But Dave looked at it and had a lot of critiques of it, so I redid it. Stuck around after class ended at one for two hours before I had to leave to start cooking, because Avril said she would be stopping by during our digital workshop (1-4pm) to explain more about the requirements for our assessment for her module, but she apparently never showed up, which I am very angry about. Thats just rude. After class, went and got groceries, and then came home and started cooking!

But before I get into that - the weather is insane here right now. I don't know if you have seen anything about it, probably not now that Nelson Mandela's death has rather taken over the news (which is not a complaint, just a fact) - but England's east coast is apparently experiencing the worst tidal surge in 60 years. You can read the news about it here, but basically what that means for Scotland and Edinburgh, is that we had winds reaching up to 228 km/hr today. Most of the trains were shut down all day. A man was killed when the lorry he was driving was blown over, and a man was hospitalized after he was hit by a tree being blown down in the meadows. Personally, walking to school was really scary. It had calmed down quite a bit by the time I left school, it was much less windy and was no longer raining (we also had a brief, two-second first snowfall of the year today!), which was good. But this morning, when I woke up, it was because the wind was howling outside, and the building was actually moving, and that is saying something considering its stone. I almost got hit by a bus on the way to school because a gust of wind sent me stumbling into the street. It also almost brought me to a standstill a couple of times because walking into it was like walking into a wall. 

Crazy. Though Dave asked Kate and I if we had weather like this in Canada and we were just like dude, Britain is one of the most meteorologically and geologically uneventful places in the world. Would you like to hear our insane weather stories? We have a lot of them. 

So I got home and started cooking. First up the latkes, which may have got a bit of blood in them (stupid graters. Stupid onions). 

People were starting to text me at this point letting me know they weren't going to make it, so I was a bit worried that I had overdone it on the potatoes, but there were no leftovers!

Huzzah! After that I prepped the tofu for the tofu schnitzel, and then we were ready to start frying! Unfortunately, I neglected to account for the effect frying food in oil tends to have on fire alarms, and we were treated to an extended period of both the fire alarm in the kitchen and the one in the living room going off before I, standing on the kitchen counter to reach the stupid thing, finally managed to turn it off, and then clambered on the dining table to make the one in the living room shut up. Unfortunately, that one I did not turn off completely, so we were treated to it occasionally going off for the rest of the cooking time - happily, Eve got quite adept at shutting it off. I definitely need to practice cooking on the gas stove more as well, as it heats and cooks very differently from electric burners. But, by all reports everything was delicious, and as there was no leftovers, I take that as a very good sign! Everyone especially loved the latkes (Lorraine's recipe of course, served with applesauce). 

For dessert, because I am somewhat insane, I decided to make sufganiyot, which I found out about by googling "Hanukkah recipes". Sufganiyot are a "round jelly doughnut eaten in Israel and around the world on the Jewish festival of Hanukkah". Except mine did not have jelly in them because even I am not that insane. Again, adventures using the gas stove, though this time I happily did not set off the alarm (at one point my friends informed me that my neighbours were at the door, so I went to the door, covered in flour and bread crumbs, ready to apologize like crazy, but apparently they just wanted to see where the water was coming into their window from, which was easier to check from above (leaning out the window in my apartment)). She (the lady just below us) had heard the alarm but just stuck her head out to make sure there wasn't an actual fire and then ignored us. 

So! An adventure!

FIRE.

Yum. Everyone gamely waited while I made the donuts, which took quite a while as they go through a couple of stages of sitting in a warm, moist place, proofing. But we all hung out, I explained Hanukkah to the best of my ability, and it was a great time.

Happy Hanukkah everyone!

Thoughts and Feelings and Latkes

Tomorrow is the last day of Hanukkah, and I spur-of-the-moment decided to invite a bunch of friends over for dinner. Which, as always, has resulted in every single one of them asking if I am Jewish.

In case you were wondering no, I am not. 

However, I am, as always, feeling the need to completely dissect why I continue to celebrate this holiday when I have no specific religious or cultural tie to it, and whether or not it is a form of cultural appropriation. I have always been fairly irreligious, and the older I get the more *over* Christmas and all its related insanity I am (the collective Western world seriously needs to slow its roll). When we started celebrating Hanukkah with my godparents a few years ago, it was really interesting for me, both because it was a look into another culture and religious tradition, and also because it was. Not. Christmas. Also, I can get behind Hanukkah a lot more - Christmas is all about celebrating the birth of a guy who, by all accounts, was a pretty cool dude, but whose religion I just don't really get - while Hanukkah, though still technically a religious holiday in the Abrahamic tradition, is all about finding light in the darkness, which is something that I find very beautiful and universal. 

Ḥănukkāh, usually spelled חנוכה, also known as the Festival of Lights and Feast of Dedication, is an eight-day Jewish holiday commemorating the rededication of the Holy Temple (the Second Temple) in Jerusalem at the time of the Maccabean Revolt against the Seleucid Empire of the 2nd century BCE. Hanukkah is observed for eight nights and days, starting on the 25th day of Kislev according to the Hebrew calendar, which may occur at any time from late November to late December in the Gregorian calendar.

So why do I continue to celebrate this holiday even when I'm not actually with the members of my family who are Jewish? I do think a part of it is that it is not Christmas. But if I wanted something that was not Christmas, I could (and do) go the completely pagan route of celebrating the winter solstice. Maybe its just that there is something immensely comforting in participating in a ritual and tradition that has hundreds of years behind it and thousands of people around the world also celebrating it. Maybe it just reminds me of home. More likely its a mish mash of a hundred little things. But I do love celebrating it. I love the ritual of it, the symbolism of it, the story behind it... and, of course, the food (latkes!!!).

I do still worry that there is an element of cultural appropriation in my celebration of this holiday though.

Also, if you are wondering, it is very hard to find a store in Edinburgh that sells menorahs and dradles. A friend suggested I call a local synagogue, but then I was like what if they ask me questions about Judaism? What if they start speaking to me in Hebrew or Yiddish? And if I say I'm not Jewish they get upset? (yes, I know I worry too much).

But whatever else, tomorrow night I will be making latkes and tofu schnitzel and spending the evening with friends, which I think is a pretty good use of time, no matter the reasons behind it.