Hanukkah

I think the way Jewish holidays like Hanukkah go by the

Jewish calendar instead of the Gregorian one shows balls in a cool way. No caving to Christians even if they're the majority. (It's hard to get a good estimate of the number of Christians in the world, but the Pew Research Center puts it at 2.3 billion in 2015. The Jewish People Policy Institute put the number of Jews at 14.2 million, which nears the pre-Holocaust number of 16.6 million.) Also, the link to the lunar calendar has a nice Asian feel. The only thing I wouldn't like about it is that you're not in the same place on your path around the sun that you are when celebrating things like New Year's, and that to me would interfere with memories of the holidays of the past. But I guess it's the times you had with the people you're remembering, not the dates they occurred on, that matter.

Anyway, although I never think it's right to say "Happy Hanukkah!" to people because that's not the spirit of it and people probably started saying it just because of the alliteration, I hope you're getting much out of celebrating whatever rituals that come with it that have meaning to you, if it applies.

P.S. My recent quarterly scans were good and I'm not dying right now. The best word people like me, who already have cancer in them, are ever going to see is "stable." You would never think that the word stable would make your heart soar, but for me, it does now.