December 14, 2020
Image by Shannon Gonyou
My husband and I celebrated our first Hanukkah together before we were formally Jewish. It was a month before our conversion classes at Anshe Emet Synagogue in Chicago had even begun, but I didn’t want to wait. We had just suffered our second consecutive pregnancy loss and I was desperate to be embraced by the warmth and light of the holiday season.
We didn’t own a single piece of Judaica, so we picked up a simple hanukkiah and candles from a local Target. We received a friendly smile from another couple as we hunted for the Hanukkah items in tandem, shuffling past copious boxes of Christmas paraphernalia before finding what we needed. We proudly took our new hanukkiah home and plopped it on the kitchen counter just in time for sundown on the first night of the holiday. Squinting self-consciously at a transliteration of the Hanukkah blessings that we had downloaded from Chabad.org, my husband and I prayed and lit the candles, hoping th