What are the rules on how we are supposed to give presents on Hanukkah? Every night or only on the eighth? Is this a Jewish tradition? If so, what’s Jewish about it?
When my mother was a kid, they celebrated Hanukkah the old-fashioned way: After lighting the candles, mom’s parents would give her some chocolate gelt, a dreidel and maybe a coin. And that was it. But in raising her own children, mom used to say—jokingly, I think—that we kids were entitled to one major Hanukkah gift each year…on Christmas Day!
Mom couldn’t stand the idea that all of our non-Jewish friends were about to receive magnificent windfalls of toys, while we got nothing. Indeed, she reasoned, it would be hard to imagine a better way to make a small child resentful of his or her Jewishness.
Therein lies the short answer to your question: The “tradition” of giving presents during Hanukkah was provoked by the long shadow that Christmas casts over Jewish homes. And nowhere is this shadow longer and darker than in America, where holiday gift-giving is a national obsession. Historians suggest that the consumerist side of the holiday began to develop in the mid-19th century, and it’s possible that Hanukkah gift-giving began about the same time.
Of course, like all things Jewish, the long answer is not so simple. For the tradition of giving gelt, or money, is apparently an older practice whose origins are unclear. An excellent article by Natasha Rosenstock on MyJewishLearning.com cites scholar Eliezer Segal, who has turned up sources mentioning that European Torah students used to give gelt to their teachers. Segal suggests that this practice was perhaps inspired by semantic and etymological connections between the Hebrew word “Hanukkah” (dedication) and the Hebrew word chinnukh (education).
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