In this season of giving it's easy to forget about treating yourself—especially with most of us finding ourselves to be financially challenged in these tough economic times. Let us at Jewcy hook you up with an awesome Hanukkah contest and ticket discounts for Matisyahu's Festival of Light Tour. Lucky Jewcy readers are eligible to enter to win a pair of tickets to Matisyahu's Hanukkah week New York shows at Webster Hall (December 21-25) and Brooklyn tour dates (December 27-30) at the Music Hall of Williamsburg. Simply email the date you'd like to attend, along with your name and phone number to contests@jewcy.com. We will randomly select winners on Friday, December 19.

If that's not enough, you can also enter to win a phone call from Matisyahu, an autographed tour poster, a T-shirt and more by signing up at matisyahuworld.com.

Here's a complete list of the New York Area Festival of Light Tour dates along with links to where you can by tickets now and get a $5 discount instantly by entering the password "Light" at checkout.

Good luck and happy Hanukkah!

Festival of Light New York Area Tour Dates:

• Sunday, December 21at Webser Hall

• Monday, December 22 at Webster Hall

• Tuesday, Decmber 23 at Webster Hall

• Thursday, December 25 at Webster Hall

• Saturday, December 27 at the Music Hall of Williamsburg

• Sunday, December 28 at the Music Hall of Williamsburg

• Monday, December 29 at the Music Hall of Williamsburg

• Tuesday, December 30 at the Music Hall of Williamsburg

I went to a pub quiz last night with a couple friends where we were rewarded for knowing, among other things, Beyonce’s age, the capital of Oman, and the gross fish export of Qatar in kilotons (we didn’t actually know that number, but our team had the closest guess). The questions were divided into categories, and one category was ChrismaHanuKwanzaa, with one question about each holiday. We rocked Christmas and Hanukkah, but stumbled when asked what year Kwanzaa was first celebrated (1966, apparently).

It got me thinking about Kwanzaa in general. Wikipedia’s Kwanzaa entry is very informative and has a nice section about the controversy surrounding the holiday. The whole thing makes me sad, though. I wish Hanukkah was as meaningful a holiday as Kwanzaa is meant to be. But seeing the way people think about Kwanzaa (Tony Snow has called it “fraudulent”), even with all its cool principles and ideals, I don’t have much hope. The problem with Hanukkah, in my mind, is that it doesn’t have much of a spiritual base, and yet everybody loves it because it involves fried food and presents. The problem with Kwanzaa is that it has an awesome ideological base, but almost nobody really gets into it. I know the OC got everybody into Chrismakkuh a few years ago, but I wish someone would start Hanuzaa. That would be AWESOME.

Last night Danny, Dave and I had plans to make latkes, so after a quick trip to the grocery store for supplies, we headed back to my apartment for some serious potato action. Everybody loves eating latkes, but it’s easy to forget that making latkes usually means grating your knuckles in with the potatoes, and later on setting a medium to large grease fire. That the smoke alarm will go off often enough to warrant being set outside on the porch is, at least in my experience, a given.

To my knowledge, this is the first year of my life that no one shed any blood over the latkes I ate, which is very exciting. There was small fire at one point, but we had gone over grease fire protocol before we started frying, so we were able to contain it without too much trouble. The smoke, though, was another issue entirely. Maybe it’s because most of the windows in my apartment are painted shut, or maybe we just had poor ventilation, but it was pretty intense. It didn’t help that the light in my kitchen has been acting strangely, and was only giving off this weird dim glow. A dark smoky room with greasy people running around in a slight panic—it was like a cheap sad little dance club. The latkes, though, came out beautifully, especially our sweet potato attempts with ginger. By the time we had eaten our fill the kitchen was less sketchy, but I left the door to the porch open for a few hours to try to get the ‘eau de charred potatoes” out.

After we had partaken I realized I’d left my candles at the party the night before, so we went back to Danny’s house to pick them up, at which point Danny had a brilliant idea: a beer bottle chanukiah. Using some packing tape, 8 bottles of Rolling Rock and 1 bottle of Stella for the Shamash, we came up with a thing of beauty. When I went home and described it to my roommate and her friends they insisted we make our own, so within an hour I had built and lit two beer bottle chanukiot. I have never been more hipster.

The only problem with last night’s fun is that this morning when I woke up the whole apartment still smelled like latkes. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I’m a bit concerned about how long this will last…

Last night I went to a holiday party at a friend’s house, and at some point the Jewish contingent (all three of us) went out to the backyard to light the hanukiah I had stashed in my purse. I felt a little awkward about the whole thing, but it was a huge relief to be away from Mariah Carey’s Christmas album, which was playing inside. The Yids ended up staying outside for awhile with a couple of delightfully irreverent musicians and the inevitable discussion of sex and what we all wish people knew about sex ensued. I have had some variation of this conversation at every party I’ve attended in the last five years, so I kind of assumed that when I went inside to get more beer and baklava everyone else would be having similar debates, but since the rest of the party was mainly grad students from Vanderbilt’s Divinity school, they were talking about church and the Word. So lame. And Mariah Carey was still playing, which I just couldn’t get over. When I accidentally stepped on a kitten (it’s fine, but trust me when I say there’s no feeling worse than thinking you may have harmed a cute little kitten), and Mariah’s version of “Jesus, Oh What a Wonderful Child” came on, I decided it was time to head home.

Back at my apartment, my (non-Jewish) roommate Kelsey and I made “Holiday Cookies” while watching National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. Hanukkah themed cookie cutters don’t seem to exist in Nashville, so I had bought an alphabet set from Williams-Sonoma which ended up being an excellent decision. We spent a good hour rearranging the letters to spell various amusing and inappropriate words. Before she left to meet her boyfriend Kelsey grabbed one of the cookies and said, “Hanukkah is awesome!” I’m a little worried that she thinks Hanukkah is somehow connected to us spelling SEXY out with cookie letters, but whatever. I’ll take dirty cookie Scrabble over dreidl any day.

On the second night of Hanukkah I lit candles with my friend Danny, who’s getting a master’s degree in Judaic Studies. After we’d finished with the blessings Danny told me that he was annoyed by Hanukkah because he didn’t agree with the way the Maccabees forced everyone to go along with their rebellion. Earlier that afternoon I read Chuck Klosterman’s newest column in Esquire, where Klosterman basically says that even if we wanted to overthrow our government and stage some sort of rebellion, Americans today are too sedate and confused to pull it off. Klosterman says, “I assume the type of person who hurls rocks in public is not the type of person I would agree with about anything. Modernity has created a cosmic difference between intellect and action, even when both are driven by the same motives; as such, the only people qualified to lead a present-day revolution would never actually do so. Contemporary leaders are not rock-throwing guys. And this is a problem, because it's the rock throwers who get things done.”

It’s hard to know who’s right in this case. I think Danny has a good point- the Maccabees were pretty hardcore and ended up alienating half of the Jewish community at the time. On the other hand, if they hadn’t stepped up, the Jewish people could easily have disappeared altogether.

For a safe (and possibly wimpy) middle ground, check out the Progressive Jewish Alliance’s website for some tips on how to keep your Hanukkah celebrations economically just, whether you’re buying presents, traveling, or just want some relevant materials to study during the holiday.

When I was in elementary school we learned this very zealous Hanukkah song called “Light One Candle” which urged us to light candles for, among other things, “the Maccabee Children with thanks their light didn't die,” “the pain they endured when their right to exist was denied,” “the terrible sacrifice justice and freedom demand” and “those who are suffering pain we learned so long ago.” Despite the fact that the complete lyrics of this song make only marginal sense (you can check them out here), it invariably brings me close to tears, and I absolutely cannot help myself from thinking about it when I light my first candle every year. It’s the whole “Maccabee Children” thing that does me in. I always picture one of the kids from the Christian Child Charity commercials, with Katherine Hepburn in the background telling me that if I don’t pay the $5 a day that it takes to feed this child, I shouldn’t be able to sleep at night.

Matthias’s five sons likely did live in filth since they were always hiding out in caves, but warfare, not poverty, was likely their biggest concern. The Maccabee children had Greek sharpshooters on elephants to worry about. These days, if the children soldiers of the world got to fight alongside their brothers, and had only elephant riding bow-and-arrow wielding enemies to fight, that’d be a huge improvement. There are over 300,000 child soldiers fighting in armed conflicts worldwide. During Sierra Leone’s civil war, thousands of young boys were taken from their families and forced to fight in rebel armies where their commanders often gave them hallucinogenic drugs in order to get them excited for battles.

Keeping these unwilling Maccabees in mind on the first few nights of Hanukkah isn’t a bad idea. And if you want to do a little more, Save the Children and UNICEF both run camps and schools that help rehabilitate former child soldiers, and will happily accept monetary donations of any amount.

Hey everybody, I'm Tamar, your Hanukkah blogger and latke queen. Currently I live in Nashville, where I'm a grad student at Vanderbilt University and do all kinds of work in the Jewish community. Every day I'll have some notes about Hanukkah fun and tips for your own celebrations.

It's kind of funny that I'm blogging for Hanukkah, because for the past few years I've been trying to get over my Hanukkah-hatred. For years I was all belligerent that Jews celebrated this pseudo-holiday with such gusto because it all just seemed so derivative of Christmas. I felt like Jews had been tricked into celebrating Jesus's life, and that made me crazy. Then, two years ago I heard a dvar Torah by Prof. Ben Sommer of Northwestern Univeristy about how the lulav and etrog that we wave around on Sukkot are derived from pagan rituals. Sukkot is my favorite holiday, and I'd always thought it was so original and different from anything anyone else did, so the dvar pretty much blew my mind.

Here's the thing, though: Just because we borrowed some custom from another group or religion doesn't mean we can't make it awesome. And even if the first people to get into the holiday were doing so because they secretly loved Christmas trees- well, so what? YOU don't have to love Christmas trees.

So yeah, it still bothers me that everyone thinks that Christmas and Hanukkah have some kind of moral connection, (even though our holiday is about war and strife and how good we were at killing the people who wanted to kill us, and Christmas is about virgin birth) but I'm not letting the War on Christmas get between me and my rockin' Hanukkah cookies. This Hanukkah, put up decorations, sing some songs, eat a donut—and be glad Hanukkah Harry never really caught on.