Hanukkah Rant

 

Ah yes, Hanukkah … that beautiful time of year when we honor miracles, light candles, and participate in the sacred tradition of making our kitchens smell like fried potatoes for eight to twelve business days.

When chain stores decide they're experts on Jewish tradition. “Celebrate Hanukkah with us!” they say, proudly displaying three sad blue gift bags, a menorah that looks like it was designed by someone who’s only seen Judaism from a distance, and a single box of matzo from last April because “it seemed close enough.”

Meanwhile, commercials act like Hanukkah is just Christmas Lite™ ... “Give BIG GIFTS for EIGHT NIGHTS!” Sorry, pal, we don’t do eight nights of giant presents. This isn't Santa’s endurance event. By night three we're already in “here’s socks and a chocolate coin, don’t get greedy” territory.

And the latkes. Oh, the latkes. Social media is alive with “Make perfect golden potato pancakes effortlessly!” Effortlessly?! Have you ever grated potatoes for latkes? By the end my knuckles look like I lost a bar fight with a cactus. I am sweating, crying, and questioning whether potatoes are worth emotional trauma. (They are. Always. But still.)

Then there’s the dreidel. Ads show elegant families spinning dreidels like it's some refined intellectual pastime. Meanwhile, in real life, someone is yelling because the chocolate gelt melted on the carpet and someone else is arguing about whether gimmel counts if the dreidel fell off the table.

You want the real miracle? Keeping track of which night we're on when opening the junk drawer, finding 14 Hanukkah candles, 3 birthday candles, and panicking until someone yells, “Alexa, how many nights of Hanukkah are left?”

But it’s wonderful. It's warm. It's light in the dark. It’s potatoes and songs and cozy sweaters and one cousin who takes latke-making way too seriously insisting theirs are crispier because they “felt the ancestors guiding their frying technique.”

Happy Hanukkah. May your candles burn bright, your oil not splatter like it’s trying to fight you, and your dreidel land on gimmel at least once when someone’s actually watching.

________________________

In my family, we celebrate both Hanukkah and Christmas, which basically means December is a festive emotional obstacle course with twice the candles, twice the carbs, and enough decorative lighting to make the neighbors question whether we're trying to signal passing aircraft. It’s chaotic. It’s beautiful. It’s glitter, menorah wax, and cookie crumbs everywhere. And honestly? I wouldn’t have it any other way.

The US Government Declares War on a Typeface

 

Three days ago (12/9/2025), Secretary of State Marco Rubio banned the use of Calibri across all State Department communications, declaring the font “woke”

Before we get to the theatrics, let’s start with the boring, human part: the U.S. government originally shifted from Times New Roman to Calibri in 2023 because it was easier to read. Full stop. Better for people with dyslexia. Better for low-vision readers. Better for screen readers.

It was about access, not aesthetics.

But in the age of symbolic governance, even readability can’t escape the culture-war centrifuge. And so here we are, watching a Secretary of State dust off Times New Roman like it’s some ancient relic of civic virtue and not a perfectly fine typeface retired for perfectly practical reasons.

This is the new political circus: turn a typography choice into a tribal marker, frame accessibility as ideology, and cast Calibri as the villain skulking in the margins of American decline. A font, suddenly “informal,” “wasteful,” or somehow spiritually suspect … depending on which side of the outrage machine you’re standing near when it starts to smoke.

This is governance as stagecraft. The performance of decisiveness instead of the practice of it. Swap nuance for noise, and voilà: instant headline. A victory you can claim without solving a single real problem.

But the people who actually need accessible typography? They’re not on the playbill. They don’t get a spotlight. They’re collateral to the bit.

Because this was never about fonts. It’s about the irresistible lure of symbolic skirmishes ,,, easy battles fought for the cameras while the hard ones wait, gathering dust like an unused policy binder.

A country can survive a bad typeface. What’s harder is surviving leadership that confuses the theater for the mission, that mistakes the show for the work, that fights the font instead of fixing the world the font was meant to help people understand.

And that’s the part we should all read in bold.

4th Grade? Really?

 

You've heard it before: Write your copy at a fourth-grade reading level.

Good advice, but understand it before you follow it:

Write your copy at a fourth-grade reading level. Not like a fourth grader. It's not about dumbing down your message, it's about making it clear and easy to understand.

Make the words clean, frictionless, impossible to misunderstand. Let the sentences walk instead of wobble. Let the ideas breathe instead of wheeze.

People don’t crave complexity; they crave clarity. And clarity isn’t dumbing things down, it’s removing the clutter so the message can actually get through without wearing hiking boots.

Simple is strong. Simple is sharp.

Simple doesn’t talk down to anyone ... it just opens the door and says, “Come on in.”

8 Didn't Make the Cut

An impressive amount (or what my daughter would call a "crap ton") of what I write ends up n the editing room floor.

To get a headline or opening line right, I write 5 or 10 variations and then pick the best of the bunch ... or mix and match words from a couple and patch 'em together ... or, unsatisfied, write 5 or 10 more and start the process over again.

This process is a goulash of writing, thinking, and editing. 

Example:

Here's the first step for writing the headline/first line for a piece on editing:

Editing is just writing’s awkward next morning. You wake up, look at what you made, and whisper, “Oh… wow. Okay.”

 

Editing: because every writer deserves the humbling experience of realizing they are not, in fact, a genius.

 

Editing is where you meet the version of yourself who thought that sentence was a good idea.

 

Editing is where your brilliant ideas go to find out they weren’t that brilliant.

 

Editing is what separates the writers from the word-hoarders.

 

You don’t write a good piece. You edit until it stops embarrassing you.

 

The first draft says, “I’m a genius.” Editing says, “Calm down, Hemingway.”

 

Writing feels like creation. Editing feels like crime scene cleanup.

 

Editing: because someone has to protect readers from whatever the hell you thought was clever yesterday.

 

Which would you pick? 

Or would you do some mixing and matching?

Or would you push this list to the side and start over?