Tag: joy

The Jewish Festival of Hanukkah

Today, 15 December in 2025, Jews around the world gather to celebrate the first day of Hanukkah, a festival rich in memory, meaning, and light. As winter deepens and days feel short and fragile, Hanukkah arrives as a quiet but resilient act of hope. It recalls a moment when faith was threatened by oppression and conformity, and when a small community chose courage, identity, and trust over fear.

At the heart of Hanukkah is the lighting of the menorah, one candle on the first night, growing steadily brighter as each evening passes. It’s a gentle ritual, yet deeply powerful, reminding those who take part that light doesn’t need to be overwhelming to be transformative. Even a single flame can push back darkness, can offer warmth, can be seen from a window and shared with the world outside.

The festival remembers the rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem and the story of the oil that should have lasted one day but burned for eight. Whether heard as history, tradition, or sacred story, it speaks of endurance beyond expectation, of provision where none seemed possible. It invites reflection on what it means to stay faithful when resources are thin and the odds feel stacked against you.

Hanukkah is also a time of joy, family, food, song, and storytelling. Children play games, gifts are exchanged, and tables are filled with foods fried in oil, celebrating abundance in the midst of scarcity. In a fractured world, Hanukkah offers a steady, luminous reminder that identity matters, hope endures, and light, patiently tended, can still change everything.

Note: The date of Hanukkah changes each year because it follows the Jewish calendar rather than the Gregorian calendar used by most of the world. The Jewish calendar is lunisolar, shaped by both the moon and the sun. Months begin with the new moon and last 29 or 30 days. Hanukkah always starts on the 25th day of the Hebrew month of Kislev, but because the Jewish year doesn’t match the length of the solar year, the festival shifts when mapped onto the Gregorian calendar. To keep festivals in their proper seasons, the Jewish calendar occasionally adds an extra month. This prevents celebrations from drifting through the year, but the exact Gregorian date still varies, usually falling in late November or December. So while Hanukkah’s timing is fixed within Jewish tradition, it appears to move each year on modern calendars, reflecting an ancient, carefully balanced way of marking time.

A Reflection on Joy at Christmas

At Christmas, the difference between happiness and joy comes into sharper focus. The season itself is often wrapped in happiness, familiar songs, warm lights, shared meals, laughter, and moments of comfort and nostalgia. This kind of happiness is good and gift-like, but it’s also fragile. It depends on things lining up, relationships feeling easy, finances holding steady, and the ache of loss staying quietly in the background. When those things don’t fall into place, Christmas happiness can feel thin, or even painful.

Christian joy tells a deeper story. The joy of Christmas isn’t rooted in perfect circumstances but in the astonishing claim that God chose to draw near, not in power or certainty, but in vulnerability. The birth of Jesus doesn’t arrive in a calm, well-ordered world. It comes amid fear, displacement, political oppression, and ordinary human anxiety. That matters, because it means joy isn’t the denial of darkness, it’s light entering it.

Joy, in this sense, is a steady confidence that God is with us, not just when the table is full and the house is warm, but when the heart feels heavy or the season stirs grief as much as gratitude. It allows space for sorrow without surrendering hope. It says that love has taken flesh and pitched its tent among us, and that nothing, not loss, not uncertainty, not brokenness, has the final word.