Hanukkah

It's the first night of Hanukkah, so I celebrated by making matzo ball soup for dinner. And then, of course, before serving it I lit the candles, and said the blessings - the three blessings for the first night, two being enough for the rest, as the Shehecheyanu, the most all-purpose of all Jewish blessings, is added to the first.

And, in a mental state verging on cognitive dissonance, this is also the day I pulled the artificial Christmas tree out of storage and set it up for B. to decorate (which she did later in the day, mostly while I was out, to the accompaniment of a DVD of The Muppet Christmas Carol). I've been setting up the tree every year for the last 30+, but not previously, I think, on the same day as the first night of Hanukkah. It's OK with me - it's her tree, I'm just the delivery boy - but it feels a little odd and it's definitely not what I would have expected as a boy when I was very patriotic about my faith.

I also got out today to the Beethoven Center at the university library for their monthly noon concert, which this month had no Beethoven in it. But Beethoven loved fugues, so he'd been unlikely to object to a brass quintet playing excerpts from Bach's The Art of Fugue. Nor, perhaps, would he have objected to Malcolm Arnold's Brass Quintet, though he lived before its time.

It's been raining, but not enough to wash away the mud left behind by the September fence workers in our parking space. It's just mud (dirt when dry) and hard to keep from tracking around on my shoes.

I'll have to put off an account of Tuesday for another day.