Chanukah, 5776, 2015, Day #7, Now for The Turkey; Chodesh Tov!

I guess my Chanuka series is a bit off, since I blog in the morning and tell about the day before. This post is called "," but it's really more about the Sixth Day of Chanukah, not the Seventh. I hope that slight inaccuracy doesn't really bother anyone.

The 6th and 7th days of Chanukah are both Rosh Chodesh (beginning of the Jewish Month.) That makes all of the prayers much longer than usual, record-breaking long actually. There are extra prayers added for both Rosh Chodesh and Chanukah. There was a rousing Hallel said/sang in our synagogue, but less was done as song than we do at the Women's Rosh Chodesh Prayers at Shiloh Hakeduma, Tel Shiloh.  Regardless, we ended late enough. In a couple of hours, rain or shine, I'll be going to doven at the site of the Ancient Biblical Mishkan, Tabernacle at Tel Shiloh, Gd willing.

We had a quiet Shabbat, my husband and I, for a change, no guests and no invitations to eat at neighbors. I had started inviting people, but everyone had other plans, so I gave up. That's one of the reasons I decided to go for the turkey I had bought about Thanksgiving time. No, it isn't/wasn't a whole turkey or even a half. I bought four turkey drumsticks. There's a lot of meat on them, so it doesn't pay to serve for guests who frequently don't finish them. Each is a serving as far as I'm concerned. I decided to cook up two of them as a "one pot meal" in a "bake and serve" dish.

Nobody could really call this a traditional Thanksgiving recipe, but it's as close as we got to one. In a large round baking dish I placed:

• 2 turkey drumsticks, (yes, 2 more remain frozen and waiting)
• large carrot cut in big pieces*
• small sweet potato (yam,) cut in big pieces
• a green squash, also cut in big pieces
• a cut orange that had been waiting in the fridge for a special occasion, (an apple would have had been good, too)
• and a couple of large mushrooms, since we like mushrooms, but they're optional
• a bit of oil dribbled on top 

I covered it all with aluminum foil; you can also bake this in a pan that has a cover. And then I baked it at a high heat until I was sure that the turkey was safely cooked. 

This Not Your Thanksgiving Turkey Dish was moist and tasty. I served it with a large salad and some more vegetables, a Cauliflower and Carrot dish. My husband had rice, too. I drank some beer and he had wine; he also started with his chicken soup.

You don't have to use the exact vegetables and fruit that I did. If you're using frozen vegetables, add them when the turkey is almost fully cooked, or they will be an unappetizing and unhealthy mush. Please let me know if you try this recipe and whatever changes you've made, thanks.

*The vegetables are all cut in in big pieces so they won't overcook and become a mush. The turkey takes longer to cook than vegetables.

Thanksgivukkah, Esser Agartoth's Havel Havelim and Some Double-Holiday Videos

First of all I must thank Esser Agaroth for his excellent pre-Chanukah Havel Havelim.

Join our International Jewish, Israeli blog community. If you would like to submit a post, you may do so through our on-line submission form, hosted by Blog Carnival. If you would like to host, please join our Facebook Group.  Any questions, please contact me at shilohmuse at gmail dot com, thanks.

Chanukah is the Jewish Holiday of  thanks, Thanksgiving?, for a couple of reasons. The first is that the name of the historic heroic figure in the holiday's background story is יהודה Yehuda, Judah, which means thank you to G-d.  The name first appears when the Jewish Matriarch Leah, wife of Ya'aqov (Jacob) gives that name to her fourth son to show her thanks to G-d.

Genesis Chapter 29 בְּרֵאשִׁית
לה וַתַּהַר עוֹד וַתֵּלֶד בֵּן, וַתֹּאמֶר הַפַּעַם אוֹדֶה אֶת-יְ--ה עַל-כֵּן קָרְאָה שְׁמוֹ, יְהוּדָה; וַתַּעֲמֹד, מִלֶּדֶת. 35 And she conceived again, and bore a son; and she said: 'This time will I thank the LORD.' Therefore she called his name Judah; and she left off bearing.

The Al Hanissim "Because of the Miracles" Prayer, added during the eight days of Chanukah is also a Prayer of Thanksgiving to G-d for making it possible for the small seemingly weak Jewish People to defeat the mighty Greeks.  So, to be precise, we Jews have had a Thanksgiving Holiday thousands of years before there ever was a United States.

This year's rare calendar coincidence has inspired many American Jews in the states and some ex-pats, too. Here are a couple of clever videos.  Enjoy!

The first is a very clever one from Stand with Us.


Sorry, but as cheery as that video is, it doesn't hold a candle to Benji Lovitt's brilliant holiday special.


Enjoy them both!

It's Not Thanksgiving If It's Not At Aunt Pauline's...

These are pictures from my old album, the photo album I made when I was in the Sixth Grade or younger.  I took the pictures.  They were taken with whatever cheap, simple camera a little kid, or even an ordinary family, would have had in the middle-late 1950's.  Those with "good eyes" will see that I still take similar pictures in terms of simple composition.  I do like to photograph anything and everything wherever I am.

But this is about Thanksgiving and family...

The lower-most picture was taken on Thanksgiving decades before many of you were born.

But for me it's only Thanksgiving if we're at Aunt Pauline's tiny one bedroom apartment.

We've only "celebrated" Thanksgiving once since our aliyah in 1970.  A neighbor decided to organize a large dinner together.  It was great fun, but it wasn't Thanksgiving for me, at least.

Aunt Pauline was one of my mother's four older sisters, the third of the three daughters my grandmother had with her first husband.  My grandmother was a poor widow with three daughters when she married my widowed grandfather who had two sons, who were the same ages as her younger daughters.  Together they had four more children, three girls and a boy, not in that order.  My mother is second to youngest.  Only she and her younger sister are still alive.  You can see many of the same people in the group pictures in this blog's banner.  Also, Aunt Florence from Far Rockaway is in the uppermost picture here and in the table picture in the banner.

All of Aunt Pauline's apartment was as crowded as this kitchen scene.  Food was also eaten in the bedroom.  For me food wasn't the focus of these Thanksgiving get-togethers.  I loved observing my older cousins, watching and listening to them.  Everyone talked at once, and they were all very funny, at least the ones who could be heard over the roar of people.  I think that's pretty normal for large families.  We'd finish each other's sentences and have simultaneous multiple conversations; at least that's how I remember it. And it wasn't considered rude.

We didn't sit around a formal dinner table.  I don't even know if she had one.  My aunt was a single-parent (divorced) and raised her daughter alone.  She wasn't the only single parent in the clan, but the others were widowed.  Yes, quite a large number of my cousins only had one parent by the time they finished high school and some were much, much younger when a parent passed away.

My aunts and uncles did their best to help their siblings and nieces and nephews out.  My father, who had a business as a CPA, hired a couple of my older cousins every year at tax season.  He was a surrogate father as best as he could be.  One followed him and became an accountant, too.

When I became religious and wouldn't eat traif, I'd eat someplace kosher first and then go to Aunt Pauline's.  One year Aunt Sadie, who lived at the time a short walk from Aunt Pauline, took me to the East Midwood Jewish Center's kitchen where we ate a delicious meal.  Aunt Sadie (Finkelstein) was the secretary to Rabbi Halpern and also did work for the caterer, which was why we were welcomed to the best food in the shul kitchen.  She appears in the table picture in the banner and is standing in the kitchen picture.  The following year I brought my husband (we were engaged at the time) and we first went to Aunt Rosie and Uncle Joe's apartment to eat.  Aunt Rosie and Uncle Joe are sitting at the table in the banner picture and she's also one of the children in the banner.

Then my husband and I got married, made aliyah and Thanksgiving wasn't on our calendar.  A few years later, Aunt Pauline's daughter began hosting the event in her large suburban home.  I understand that fewer people came, though there was plenty of room.  Most of my cousins have had to spend Thanksgiving with in-laws or moved too far away.  Now, if I'm not mistaken, the third generation, one of Aunt Pauline's granddaughters, has taken over hosting the family Thanksgiving dinner.

Here in Israel, we thank G-d all the time.  I live a different life, but just look at the banner of this blog and you'll see that I do miss those days and all the family.