Festival of Lights and Miracles

Yesterday, I graced you with two posts - one about my hormonal issues and the other happened to have been about the topic of this month- finances. Did you catch it? I highly recommend taking a look at the crap we waste money on. I mean, this IS the holiday season, after-all, and we do waste plenty of money on gifts that most people don't need/want/use.

Happy Chanukkah!

This time of year usually makes me sad - I'm not around my family for the big Chanukkah parties or the lighting of the menorah on the first night at Campus Martius in Detroit. Craig is also far from his family in South Africa. We miss an element of "family" and Chanukkah just becomes another day. Someone at work asked me if we're doing anything fun during Chanukkah and I actually answered YES this time.

MY COUSIN IS IN ISRAEL!! WHOO HOO!!

I'm in the middle, the one visiting is on the right, and the one on the left is her sister.

We're picking her up at the airport, tonight! She's already been here for 10 days but she's been touring the country so we haven't had a chance to see her. I'm excited to see her because I haven't seen her (or anyone else) since our Grandmother passed away in July.

Here's the thing about Chanukkah - we call it the festival of lights but it's also a time for miracles! One jar of oil lasted for eight days - a miracle! Someone set out to destroy the Jews (again) and they failed - a miracle! Not being alone on Chanukkah - a miracle! See where I'm going with this?

I feel blessed today that I get to spend some of these eight crazy nights with my "baby" cousin - and we're going to spend some of that time visiting with my grandmother's brother (she's never met him) and our cousins down south. I think I'm also going to "enlist" her into helping make that latka video tutorial for you - this should be interesting...

Anyway, to all of our Jewish readers: חג חנוכה שמח (Happy Chanukkah) and to all of our readers who aren't Jewish - stay tuned, we'll be explaining some holiday traditions for you over the next few days. We'll wish you a Merry Christmas soon, we promise!