That Hanukkah Mom
I never planned to become that mom — the Hanukkah mom. The mom who sweeps into a classroom with a menorah, PJ Library books, and a well-meaning plan to explain Jewish holidays to small children who think everything in December is Christmas-adjacent.
Our older kids go to Rockwern — Cincinnati’s Jewish Day School — which is great because the school handles the holiday thing for me. Truly, all I do is read the newsletter, see the line that says, “Parents, please come to the Hanukkah showcase,” and show up with blind faith. This year, I have to come twice, because the showcase is apparently a blockbuster event. I suspect it involves rainbows, because my son has been performing “Reading Rainbow” with full ASL choreography for anyone who hasn’t already heard it 100 times.
But my youngest son was born deaf, and because of that, our plans shifted. He goes to Ohio Valley Voices — an extraordinary school where we are, as it turns out, the only Jewish family. And when you’re the only Jewish family, your job description quietly expands. Suddenly, “parent” becomes “Jewish cultural representative” and “woman who has to dig through storage bins at 11:47 PM to find the wooden menorah she panic-bought on Amazon a few years ago.”
A few weeks ago, his school reached out and asked if I’d like to come in and share about Hanukkah. I said yes immediately because I am a people-pleaser and because the school is wonderful. And then the reality hit:
Oh no. I am that Hanukkah mom now.
Growing up in California, our Hanukkah mom was everything a 90s child imagined – an adult with her life together looked like: glossy hair, perfect lipstick, and a late-90s silver convertible BMW she would glide into the pickup line like she was starring in Shahs of Sunset. When she came in to teach about Hanukkah, she didn’t just bring a dreidel — she brought presence. Her boots alone could have convinced the entire fourth grade to join the tribe.
And now here I am, decades later, Googling “how to explain Hanukkah to toddlers,” and desperately trying to recall what my Hanukkah mom actually did, because apparently there is no manual called How to Be the Only Jewish Mom at School Without Embarrassing Yourself.
So I sought reinforcements. I emailed Marisa Phillips at PJ Library Cincinnati and confessed, “I have no idea what I’m doing — save me from myself.” A few days later she showed up with a PJ Library lunchbox somehow packed with twenty books — exactly the kind of overstuffed delivery Santa’s Jewish cousin Sol, patron saint of childhood Jewish literacy, would bring.
Now I have the books. I have the wooden menorah I finally unearthed from storage, the one I bought in a burst of aspirational Montessori parenting and then promptly forgot about. What I do not have is a clear sense of how this is actually going to go.
I keep reminding myself that the kids are two and three. They don’t need a historical deep dive into the Maccabean revolt. They just need some candles, some songs and maybe a wooden flame passed carefully from one small hand to another. For my son and his classmates, it will be less about the words and more about the rhythm and the bright shapes of a holiday they’ve never seen before.
Underneath the jokes and the panic, there’s this other feeling I can’t quite shake: gratitude. My son is the only Jewish kid in his classroom, and instead of ignoring that, his school emailed me and said, “Hey, can you teach us?” They didn’t need to. They chose to. They made space for him — for us — not just as “the family with the menorah,” but as part of the story they’re telling about who belongs in their building.
For a kid who is already working so hard to hear the world, it means something that the world wants to hear him too — his language, his traditions, his holidays.
So here we are. I’ve got my twenty PJ Library books, my rediscovered wooden menorah, and a vague plan that hinges on no one licking the dreidels. We’ll see how this goes.
If you’re a mom (or dad, or grandparent) who does this every year — who goes into classrooms and explains Hanukkah and Purim and why we have so many holidays that involve food fried in oil — you are an unspoken hero of the Jewish community. You are out there doing quiet, small-scale Jewish diplomacy between snack time and pickup, and most of us have no idea.
And if you’ve got any tips or tricks for That Hanukkah Mom — what worked, what bombed, how not to set off the fire alarm with a candle demonstration — please, by all means, let me know.
In the meantime, I’ll be the one walking into Ohio Valley Voices with a lunchbox full of books, a wooden menorah, and the hope that showing up — awkward, imperfect, totally winging it — is enough.
