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Presents vs. Mitzvot (Good Deeds)
Bringing Meaning to Your Hanukkah Celebration
By Cara J. Stevens
While many families embrace the new American tradition of exchanging presents each year, there are many ways to bring meaning to your holiday celebration. Family gatherings are a wonderful way to get generations together to share ideas and learn from each other.
Often the exchanging of presents gets in the way of the holiday celebration. "I used to like Hanukkah celebrations as a child, but as our family has grown, we've begun to focus more on the presents and the food than on the meaning of the holiday," says Christie Smith*. "I've tried to rein things in a bit in recent years by bringing Hanukkah-related activity books or crafts that the children can do together to shift some of the focus from getting presents to their presence in the present."
"To downplay the spending, but play up the giving, we do a 'white elephant' where each family brings something they no longer use," says Lauren Isenberg Zinn, an interfaith minister in Ann Arbor. "All the wrapped items are placed anonymously in the center of the room, and we take turns picking from the pile and unwrapping the unwanted item, which can turn out to be wanted by someone else ... it is all very amusing and much fun."
A variation on this idea is to set a limit to the spending – say, $5, $10 or $25 – and have everyone bring a wrapped new gift. One guest at a time can open their gift, and after all gifts are open, you can go through each guest in the same order and allow people to swap for an item they would prefer. While the competition can get quite heated for these insignificant prizes, a present exchange becomes more of a group activity than an unnecessary overwhelming expense.
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