I say that because it’s natural to think that the lighting of the eighth candle last night ended the holiday. But it is still Hanukkah until the sun goes down this evening. And how is the last day of the holiday celebrated? By ignoring it.

As to Federal holidays (see yesterday’s article), today is Christmas. Yes, it’s the 26th, not the 25th, but because Christmas fell on a Sunday this year, the government moved the holiday to today. Well, I guess that’s ok for government work.

The District of Columbia is, for the purpose of holidays, a branch of the Federal government. So all government (Federal and District) offices are closed today, schools are closed, libraries are closed, post offices are closed, and so forth. So why is trash collection happening? Answer me that, and you win a prize.

Going back to Hanukkah, here are the three things that I learned this year. Because I am not naming names, there is no attribution, but if you want to know how I learned these things, email or contact me and I will tell you privately. And if you are the source and want to be identified, let me know.

1. For those of you who plan ahead, please be advised that there will be no Hanukkah in the year 3031! By quirk of the Jewish calendar (or, perhaps, by quirk of the Julian calendar), there will be two Hanukkahs in 3032 – the first one starting on January 1, and the second in late December. I will remind you again as the date draws closer.
2. Hanukkah is not 8 days long because the candles (or the oil) burned 7 extra days when the Temple was retaken from King Antiochus. Or if the burning did go on that long, nobody realized it until many years after the Maccabees revolted. It is 8 days long (so says Josephus and the Second Book of Maccabees according to my unnamed source) because Sukkot is 8 days long and the holiday of Sukkot had been banned by Antiochus, and it was determined to celebrate an off-season Sukkot once the Temple was restored.
3. There are, as you may know, actually 9 candles on a Hanukkiah. Eight represent the days of the holiday and the 9th is the shammes, the candle you actually light with a match and then use to light the other 8. In the film of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, Lauren Bacall asks Humphrey Bogart what he is. He tells her “I’m a shammes”. He is actually a private detective. And why is a private detective a shammes? According to my unnamed friend (who has researched and published on the subject), it goes as follows: Back in the day, in synagogues across Europe, the man who assisted the rabbi in maintaining the facility (turning on the lights, keeping it clean, putting the books back in the right place, making sure things went on time, and providing a modicum of security was known as a shammes. He was primarily an assistant. Because the 9th candle is used to assist in lighting the other 8 candles, the 9th candle began to be known as the shammes. As Jewish shopkeepers began to spread across the United States in the late 19th century, they began to call the men whom they hired to perform the same duties as a shammes in a synagogue their shammes. One of the most important roles of the retail shammes was to provide security – to make sure people paid for what they took. The security providing aspect of the shammes was then transferred to provide detectives as the years went by. Of course, no one today calls a detective a shammus. And perhaps, in years gone by, no one did other than Raymond Chandler.

What did you learn this Hanukkah?