#Eight nights of Chanukah

[fallensapphires]

Holidays: Chanukah (Hanukkah)

The darkness of the whole world cannot swallow the glowing of a candle.

[blackpearlblast]

Eight Nights of Hope

Last year, I didn't really celebrate Hanukkah, at least not in an emotional sense. I was too busy grieving as I witnessed merciless killing in the Gaza strip, along with my religion being used as an excuse for that killing. And this year, depressingly little has changed. In many ways, things are worse than ever, while changes in my own physical health have impacted the methods with which I can fight for change.

This year I want to celebrate Hanukkah, and I want you all to help me. Hanukkah is, to me, a holiday about hope. Specifically, it's a holiday about not giving up hope when everything looks utterly impossible and hopeless, and putting forward what little you have to try to spark some light in the darkness. It's an assertion that you can never know what is truly hopeless until you've tried, and that the fragile act of trying can bring forth an inferno of light and warmth that can last far longer than you could have ever imagined.

Using Tumblr is still hard for me, but I've set up a queue that will post once for every night of Hanukkah so that I don't have to log in more than once. Each post has a campaign for a family from Gaza who is either trying to survive amidst the genocide or managed to flee before the border closed and are now trying to survive in a new place with their lives entirely uprooted. It would mean so, so much to me if you could try to give a little bit to each of them. I know times are rough, so if giving the minimum amount to each campaign is still too much, you could try alternating and giving to every other campaign. And even if you can only donate to one campaign, the candle that stands alone-- the shamash-- could be considered the most important candle of all; after all, it is responsible for lighting all of the other eight. And if there's nothing at all you can give- well, wipe that thought out of your mind because sharing this post and the posts with the campaigns is something! Personally, I will be committing to donating ~20 USD per campaign (a little inexact due to GoFundMe requiring you to donate in the currency the campaign is hosted in and not your own currency). I really hope you can join me with whatever you can give, whether it's 20 USD per campaign, or 5, or a reblog and telling a friend. Let's try to use what little we have to shine some light into this cold, empty night we are witnessing. We never know how much impact it could have until we try.

Check the #eight nights of hope tag on my blog to see all of the nights that have been posted so far!

[nobodynotbymitski]

ever since watching eight crazy nights by adam sandler i have been too traumatised for hanukkah, that being said, happy hanukkah to those who celebrate!

[skyllion-uwu]

Yo check out this concept sketch for a Round and Round We Go cover I made

I will not be forgiven for making this

[ljf613]

Song of the Day 12/8/23: "Hasmonean (A Hamilton Hanukkah)" - The Maccabeats

How does a Hasmonean, son of a priest And a Hebrew, raised in a village with his four brothers In a Judean province ruled by pompous king Antiochus Under pressure, grow up to be a hero and commander?

[roesolo]

Holiday Reads: Eight Nights, Eight Lights by Natalie Barnes & Andrea Stegmaier

How was everyone’s Thanksgiving? I hope all who celebrate had a wonderful gathering. Now, it’s time for the winter holiday to kick into high gear! Here’s my first pick for holiday books this season: Eight Nights, Eight Lights. Eight Nights, Eight Lights, by Natalie Barnes/Illustrated by Andrea Stegmaier, (March 2023, Kane Miller), $14.99, ISBN: 9781684644414 Ages 4-8 A thriving community…

[kosher-martian]

We need more Hanukkah movies/specials. Real ones, not reskinned Hallmark movies. The only ones I can think of are:

A Rugrats Chanukah - a classic for us 90s kids.

Lamb Chop's Special Chanukah- I bet your grandparents had a copy on VHS.

Full Court Miracle - actually a really enjoyable Disney Channel Original Movie and one of two "basketball+ethnic holiday" movies they made, which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened twice.

Eight Crazy Nights - no further comment

What, we couldn't even get to eight movies? We somehow control the entertainment industry and the best we could do is two specials, a TV movie, and a single theatrical release between 1995 and 2003?

I mean sure this plays nicely into my theory that the 90s were an unparalleled time of normalized (i.e. not gawking) Jewish visibility in US media that we have not seen since... but it doesn't have to be! The era of streaming and nonstop content means there has to be at least one desperate coked-out executive who'll throw money at us just to get content to push for the holidays.

You can have this one for free (just do a special thanks in the credits everyone will skip): Hanukkah, Chanukah, Chanuka! A spelling bee + Hanukkah movie.

[girlactionfigure]

“Chanukah, 5692. 'Judea dies', thus says the banner. 'Judea will live forever', thus respond the lights”.

A Jewish Hanukkah menorah defies the Nazi swastika, 1931

It was the eighth night of Chanukah in Kiel, Germany, a small town with a Jewish population of 500. That year, 1931, the last night of Chanukah fell on Friday evening, and Rabbi Akiva Boruch Posner, spiritual leader of the town was hurrying to light the Menorah before the Shabbat set in.

Directly across the Posner’s home stood the Nazi headquarters in Kiel, displaying the dreaded Nazi Party flag in the cold December night. With the eight lights of the Menorah glowing brightly in her window, Rabbi Posner’s wife, Rachel, snapped a photo of the Menorah and captured the Nazi building and flag in the background.

She wrote a few lines in German on the back of the photo. “Chanukah, 5692. ‘Judea dies’, thus says the banner. ‘Judea will live forever’, thus respond the lights.”

The image, freezing in time a notorious piece of the past, has grown to become an iconic part of history for the Jewish community. But until just recently, not much was known about the origins of the photo.

Both the menorah and photo survived World War II, with the Hanukkah finding its way to Yad Vashem through the loan of Yehudah Mansbuch. Mansbuch is the grandson of the woman who took the picture, and he retains the original snapshot.

When Yad Vashem was putting together its plans to open the Holocaust History Museum, a team of researchers set out to learn more about this famous photo. Their inquiries led to Mansbuch, who explained how his grandmother and grandfather had lived under Nazi oppression in Kiel, Germany, eventually fleeing to then-Palestine in 1934.

Yehudah Mansbuch, the grandson of the family who took the photo, remembers:

“It was on a Friday afternoon right before Shabbat that this photo was taken. My grandmother realized that this was a historic photo, and she wrote on the back of the photo that ‘their flag wishes to see the death of Judah, but Judah will always survive, and our light will outlast their flag.’ My grandfather, the rabbi of the Kiel community, was making many speeches, both to Jews and Germans. To the Germans he warned that the road they were embarking on was not good for Jews or Germans, and to the Jews he warned that something terrible was brewing, and they would do well to leave Germany. My grandfather fled Germany in 1933, and moved to Israel. His community came to the train station to see him off, and before departed he urged his people to flee Germany while there’s still time.”

The couple’s prescience saved an entire community; only eight of the five hundred Jews perished in the Holocaust, with the rest fleeing before the systematic slaughter began. Today, Yehudah Mansbuch lives in Haifa (Israel) with his family. Each Hanukkah, Yad Vashem returns the now famous menorah to the family, who light the candles for eight nights before returning the piece of history back to the Holocaust trust.

“Death to Judah,” the flag says – “Judah will live forever!” the light answers.

[jomtones-bussy]

i missed the beginning of Hanukkah this time so it balances outfrom last time. for the holidays I learned how to sing bidi bom (the Jewish one and the Mexican one) and I watched eight crazy nights.

I have been informed Hanukkah hasn't started yet. Fuck it we ball

[melodraca]

HAPPY HANUKKAH! I hope everyone had a wonderful eight crazy nights!

Bonus under the cut: melted candles and my chanukah orange

[balioc]

Holiday Engineering: What Not to Do

We can learn a lot from Chanukah, because Chanukah is a garbage-tier holiday.

I mean this in a mostly-detached, mostly-analytic way. Like many people who were raised Jewish, I have some very fond and happy memories of Chanukah. Anything can accrue fond and happy memories, if you have a way of getting people to do it. But Chanukah is full of features that actively detract from its being resonant, impressive, memorable, or fun. It is an anti-advertisement for its community.

If you're a would-be designer-of-holidays, this is actually a really useful thing. Mimicking the good and successful holidays is quite hard; their quality tends to hinge on a lot of idiosyncratic hard-to-replicate factors, and "invent something as cool and punchy as the $WHATEVER" can be a tall order. But it's easy to look at a design failure and say, "I"m not going to do that."

With that, let's go into the details:

CHANUKAH: THE GOOD

Timing. It's a midwinter festival-of-lights. Solid start. Everyone loves those. Brightness and festival cheer, in the long cold winter nights, is practically a need for many. The holiday mostly skates by just on being the winter light festival for the Jews. A+. Or, really, we should knock that down to an A, because Chanukah usually comes too early to be ideal for this purpose, but -- still, quite good.

Traditional food (side dishes). Latkes are incredibly popular, and for excellent reason. If you're trying to settle on a food that everyone will love, "fried potatoes" is a damn good choice.

CHANUKAH: THE NEUTRAL

Symbols. There's really just one that matters: the chanukiyah (nine-branched menorah). Which is, on paper, a very cool and snappy symbol. Distinctive silhouette, ritual engagement, plus the allure of fire. But it loses a lot of points for the fact that you don't actually light the whole damn thing, and get the proper visual effect, until the very end of a long-ass holiday when everyone's enthusiasm and attention have ebbed. On the first night, in particular, you light just two candles in your chanukiyah, and it looks lopsided and sad.

Traditional food (sweets). Jelly donuts are fine, I guess, if uninspiring and uninspired. Chanukah gelt is pretty lame as candy goes...but from a holiday-design perspective, it's hard to go too far wrong with giving kids candy.

Music. "Maoz Tzur" is kinda pretty. "Oy Chanukah!" is kinda fun. That's pretty much it, barring some silly kids' music (and I guess that Adam Sandler thing). Nothing that will knock anyone's socks off. But, honestly, two decent songs is more than many good holidays have.

Gifts. Being the big annual gifting holiday is a double-edged sword. It's some super-powerful mojo, culturally speaking. People are obsessed with giving and receiving gifts, in a way that's very hard to excise or evade, no matter how often you trot out your utilitarian language about deadweight loss. Chanukah gets a lot of its traction out of the fact that it's the holiday where you get presents. But. (a) In the modern world, the gifting holiday is unavoidably a locus of stress and misery for many people, and Chanukah doesn't have nearly enough upside serving to support that burden. (b) Chanukah is bad at being a gifting holiday. The gifting is not well-integrated into the event, it's a tacked-on thing copied over from Christmas, and it shows. There's no real ritual surrounding it, no presents-under-the-Christmas-tree equivalent, certainly no Santa Claus. Worse yet, the eight-day-holiday thing means that either you need a set of gifts whose awesomeness is equally divisible by eight (mega-awkward), or else you have inconsistencies and disappointments.

CHANUKAH: THE BAD

Theme. What is the holiday about, when everything is said and done? What is our key takeaway message from all the shit we're doing. "God is great, God looks out for His people, God performs mighty miracles." Stop. Shut up. You fail. That's every holiday, if you're operating within a religious tradition. You need something more than that, something powerful and deep and important and special, to be even halfway-decent as a holiday. But for the vast majority of Jews (including Jews in the most orthodox and observant denominations), that's pretty much all you get. Because...

Mythology. The story of Chanukah, the holiday's narrative raison d'etre, is just unconscionably bad. In some extremely vague sense, it's a story about Jews overthrowing foreign oppressors and casting off foreign influences...which is already pretty bad from a modern liberal perspective, we don't like jingoistic ethnonationalism these days. But the actual events of the Chanukah story are less about Jews-against-foreigners than they are about Jews-against-other-Jews. It is a story about fanatics seizing power and murdering cosmopolitans. Virtually everyone hates that shit, up to and including the most tribal-minded Jews. The rabbis of the Talmud were pretty iffy about Chanukah for exactly this reason, and didn't talk about it much, with the result that the holiday doesn't have much in the way of supporting cultural infrastructure. And you really can't tell the Chanukah myth without that horrible stuff; it's so baked-in that it gets incorporated into even the most sanitized propagandistic Hebrew-school versions of the tale (with exactly the effects that you'd expect on Hebrew school students). The miracle of the oil feels like a tacked-on narrative coda, because it is, because without it the only possible moral of the story would be "kill your neighbor if he's not pious enough for you." But it's much too little, much too late. The miracle of the oil is super lame by miracle standards: no one is saved from danger, there are no memorable SFX, the whole thing is relevant only to the rituals of a long-vanished Temple.

[There are several lessons that can be learned from this particular problem, at multiple levels of abstraction.]

Structure. You can have a good eight-day holiday, but a festival of that length needs an arc. The days need to be distinct from each other. You need to be either building up to a climax, or -- more commonly, as with Passover and [the twelve days of] Christmas -- coming down from a main celebration at the beginning in a long pleasant haze of semi-special time. Chanukah is flat and internally undifferentiated, except for the addition of more candles to the chanukiyah. You can't sustain real holiday feeling that long, and there's no particular day on which you're supposed to do anything special, so it all just turns into a mush of "how much do we care right this moment?"

Activities. The traditional dreidel game is the worst, most boring, most unbalanced game in the history of games. Pushing it on children only makes those children hate Chanukah, and Judaism, and games, and you.

Traditional food (entrees). There's no classic Chanukah dish that can serve as a viable main course, unless you're one of those people who can happily eat fried potatoes as an entire meal. This is a glaring omission. It's particularly bad for Chanukah, because Chanukah has so little else going for it that it really needs to lean hard on the standard holiday "gather for a festive meal" thing.

Social role. As many people will eagerly tell you, Chanukah was a pretty minor holiday for most of Jewish history; it got big largely because of a marketing push in the 19th and 20th centuries, mostly because people got scared about the prospect of the younger generations assimilating, and wanted to give them a holiday to compete with Christmas. Which is maybe the worst idea that anyone has ever had. For more reasons that I can easily list here, modern Western Christmas is an absolute SSS-tier holiday, one of the very best of all time. Setting yourself up as a direct competitor to Christmas -- inviting your own people to make that comparison -- is tantamount to telling them that your traditions and your community are worthless and weak, and that they should join the ranks of the gentiles. And that would be true even if your own offering were something halfway decent. Trying to do it with Chanukah...it's like Estonia declaring war on the US. It's the ultimate "we have food at home." It is, if you'll pardon my saying so, Christian rock.

[renthony]

🏳️‍🌈

(Drop a 🏳️‍🌈 in my inbox and I’ll respond with a queer media recommendation!)

It's not currently the season for it, but I'm gonna recommend a holiday-themed erotica anyway. Eight Kinky Nights by Xan West z”l is a Chanukah-themed f/f BDSM romance between a 51-year-old gray ace femme submissive named Leah, and a newly-divorced 49-year-old stone butch dom named Jordan.

Here's the official plot summary:

Sometimes the perfect Chanukah gift can change everything. Newly divorced stone butch Jordan moves into her friend Leah’s spare room, ready, at 49, to take on a new job and finally explore kink and polyamory. But moving to NYC during the holidays sends grief crashing through her, and Jordan realizes that when she isn’t solely focused on caring for others, her own feelings are unavoidable. Including her feelings for Leah. 51 year old queer femme Leah, an experienced submissive kink educator who owns a sex shop, has recently come to terms with being gray ace and is trying to rework her life and relationships to honor that. Leah has a brainstorm to help them both: she offers Jordan eight kink lessons, one for each night of Chanukah, to help Jordan find her feet as a novice dominant, and to create a structured space where Leah can work on more deeply honoring her own consent, now that she knows she’s gray ace. She’d planned to keep it casual, but instead the experience opens cracks in the armor Leah’s been using to keep people at a distance and keep herself safe. Now she needs to grapple with the trauma that’s been impacting her life for years. Can these two autistic queers find ways to cope with the changes they are making in their lives and support each other, as they build something new they hadn’t thought was possible? This kinky polyamorous Chanukah f/f romance includes a friends to lovers, roommates to lovers, kink lessons, seasoned romance and getting your groove back tropes, and polyamorous, gray ace, pansexual, Jewish, fat, autistic, disabled, arthritis, PTSD and depression representation.

I adore this book. I was actually a sensitivity reader for this one, helping give feedback on the aspec representation. I'm mentioned in the acknowledgments and am so, so happy to have gotten my hands on a paperback copy. I miss Xan dearly. Their Twitter account is forever marked as "on hiatus," and when we lost them, we lost the best damn kink-positive writer I've ever met. May their memory be a blessing, and may their writing find its way to everyone who needs it. <3

Ask For a Rec | Other Media Recommendations | Support Links

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Some Hanukkah-Related Vocabulary

Hanukkah

In Judaism, the Hanukkah holiday is the “festival of lights.” Lasting eight days, the holiday commemorates the rededication of the Temple of Jerusalem in 165 BCE. Once the Temple was won, the Jews found only enough oil to keep the eternal flame of the menorah lit for one day.

According to legend, the miracle of Hanukkah occurred when that small amount sustained the menorah’s light for eight days, in order for more oil to be made. Fittingly, hanukkah literally means “a dedication” in Hebrew.

As is the case with many languages, there are certain sounds in Hebrew that just don’t exist in English. The first letter of Chanukah, the modern Hebrew letter chet, makes a sound called a “voiceless velar fricative,” a ch in the back of the throat similar to the Scottish pronunciation of loch. The classical Hebrew pronunciation had a softer ch sound, represented by the H instead of Ch in Hanukkah. Today, both spellings exist side by side.

Menorah

The Hanukkah menorah (also called the hanukiah) is a candelabrum with nine branches. Eight of the candles represent each night of Hanukkah, while the ninth (the shammes) is used to light the others.

The original menorah in the biblical Temple of Jerusalem had only seven branches, representing the seven branches of human knowledge and the seven days of biblical creation. The Hanukkah menorah has a more specific purpose, representing the eight nights of the holiday. Translated from the Hebrew, menorah means “lamp.”

Shammes

From the Hebrew word shamash meaning “to serve,” shammes (or shames) means “attendant.” The shammes is the ninth candle on the Hanukkah menorah, used to light the candles representing each night.

The Hanukkah candles are traditionally placed in the menorah from right to left, though they’re lit using the shammes from left to right each night. On the first night of Hanukkah, the menorah will have only two candles, the shammes and the right-most candle. On the last night, a menorah will display all nine.Previous

Maccabees

In Jewish history, the celebration of Hanukkah and the rededication of the Temple of Jerusalem are the work of the Maccabees, an ancient family of Jewish leaders who rebelled against their colonizers. After years of oppression under King Antiochus Epiphanes, Judas Maccabaeus led a rebel army against Antiochus and reclaimed not only the Temple but Jewish freedom.

It is possible the name Maccabee is derived from the Hebrew maqqabh meaning “hammer.” It was given to Judas and the rebels in honor of their fortitude.

Antiochus

The “baddie” in the Hannukah story is the Greek-Syrian king Antiochus Epiphanes. But what you may not know is that there are a lot of people named Antiochus in history, particularly kings. The one in the Hannukah story is believed to be Antiochus IV.  

Yet the meaning of Antiochus in Greek is a bit confusing. Antí– means “against,” and ékhō means “to have, to own.” Taken together, his name means “one who is against owning.”

Dreidel

The dreidel is a four-sided spinning top bearing the Hebrew letters (nun, gimel, hei, shin). Children spin the dreidel and win or lose based on the letter facing up when the top stops spinning. The letters on the faces of the dreidel form an acronym for the phrase Nes Gadol Hayah Sham meaning “a great miracle happened there,” referring to Israel and the Temple of Jerusalem.

In Israel, the letters on the top are nun, gimmel, hey, pey, representing “a great miracle happened here.” A dreidel is also known as a sevivol in Hebrew. Observances vary, and some use the Hebrew terms when celebrating Hannukah.

Gelt

A piece of Hanukkah gelt is a chocolate coin usually wrapped in gold foil, designed for children to gamble with during a game of dreidel. 

Gelt is Yiddish, derived from the Old High German, for “money.”

Latke

One of the Jewish traditions of Hanukkah is to make foods made in oil to celebrate the oil lasting for eight days.

A latke is a potato pancake made from shredded potato and fried in oil, often served with applesauce or sour cream. Like gelt, latke is a Yiddish word derived from the Russian latka meaning “pastry.” The oil in which latkes are fried represents the oil that kept the menorah burning.

Sufganiyot

Another popular dish at Hannukah is sufganiyot, small jelly-filled donuts.  

The origin of the name sufganiyot is debated, and as with other terms described here, its spelling can vary. It’s said to come from the ancient Hebrew word sofgan which means a kind of spongy dough.

However, a popular story claims that God gave Adam and Eve sufganiyot to cheer them up after they were kicked out of the Garden of Eden—the name, then, comes from the Hebrew spelling of Garden of Eden.  

Apocrypha

Speaking of things that are apocryphal, the story of Hanukkah is not found in the Jewish Bible, known as the Torah. Instead, the story of the Maccabees and the Temple is found in a collection of later writings known as the Apocrypha. 

The word apocrypha comes from the Greek for “hidden, obscure.” This collection of writings, including the stories of the Maccabees, is known as the Apocrypha because their authors are “hidden” or unknown (or they weren’t written in Hebrew). 

It wasn’t until 1735 that apocrypha came to be used in reference to all kinds of marginal tales or those with unknown authors, not just Biblical ones.  

Kislev

It might seem like the holiday of Channukah changes dates every single year. But actually, the dates are the same every year—just on a different calendar. Most of the world uses what’s known as the Gregorian calendar. But Jewish holidays are set according to the Hebrew calendar, so they appear to change dates every year on the Gregorian calendar. 

Hanukkah starts at sundown on 25 Kislev every year and lasts for eight nights. Kislev is the name of the ninth month in the Hebrew calendar. The name Kislev comes from ancient Assyrian or Akkadian names for the same time period.  

Chag Sameach

How you say “Happy holidays” in Hebrew. 

Chag means “holiday,” and sameach means “happy.”

Source ⚜ More: Notes & References ⚜ Writing Resources PDFs

[mbtitypesby]

MBTI Types As Non-Traditional Hanukkah Songs

Figured everybody on Jumblr could use some introduction to the full potential range of diversity of Hanukkah songs (though I did include the classic of Light One Candle as it felt the best fit for that type) instead of always hearing the same few as imagine if Hanukkah even got 1/8 of the mainstream attention Christmas got and we could actually hear some of this shit on the radio (and imagine if that got Jewish artists who've already charted to make Hanukkah albums of their own)

ESTJ - Miracle Of Light by 8th Day

ESFJ - Hanukkah by The Living Sisters

ESTP - How Do You Spell Channukkahh by The LeeVees

ESFP - Give You Everything by Buzzy Lee

ENTJ - Dreidel Dreidel by Kosha Dillz

ENFJ - Eight Flames by Nissim Black

ENTP - Puppy For Hanukkah by Daveed Diggs

ENFP - Miracle by Matisyahu

ISTJ - Hanukkah In '96 by Alex Frankel

ISFJ - Light One Candle by Peter, Paul & Mary

ISTP - Like A Maccabee by Joanie Leeds

ISFP - My Eight Favorite Nights by Distant Cousins

INTJ - When Is Hanukkah This Year by Melee

INFJ - Chanukah - The Same Light by Danny Raphael

INTP - I Won't Be Home For Chanukah by TeamMate

INFP - More Like A Candle by Eric Hunker

[tsukumocest]

imagine chanukah with your f/o

chasing them around with a candle and lighting them on fire

making them recite the blessing even though they don’t know hebrew and making fun of them for getting it wrong.

whacking them with a heavy menorah

destroying them in dreidel and taking all the gelt. better yet taking their money

or using them as the dreidel spinning them around on the ground and laughing at them for looking stupid

leaving them by the cold window all night so they can watch the candles

making them fry latkes and burning them with hot oil

eight crazy nights of torture

[ljf613]

Alright, Chanukah starts tonight, which means it's time for me to finally make a post about different kinds of menorahs.

This right here? This is the Temple Menorah:

There's some debate over whether the branches were straight or curved, but here's a few things we do know:

It had seven branches of equal length.

It was made of one solid piece of gold

It was at least five feet tall.

It used pure olive oil.

The Temple Menorah is what people mean when they talk about The Menorah. It's what you'll see on historical or commemorative artifacts such as the Arch of Titus in Rome or Israeli currency:

During the time when the Temple stood in Jerusalem, the High Priest lit all seven flames on this Menorah every day (using the aforementioned pure olive oil):

No one lights this on Chanukah.

This is a Chanukah menorah:

There are countless variations, but here are the important things:

It has eight branches of equal length, plus a ninth "helper" branch, known as the shamash, which is set apart from the rest of the branches and used to light the others.

It can be made of any material.

It is usually used with wax candles or oil, but, if necessary, one can use anything that burns.

In Hebrew, this kind of menorah is called a chanukiah.

Some Chanukah menorahs, like the one shown above, have the shamash in the middle. Others have it on the side:

Regardless, this kind of menorah is the one that has been lit by Jews on Chanukah for thousands of years. It's the menorah you'll seen in photographs of Jewish households, including this famous picture taken in Germany in 1931:

(The message written on the back of the photo reads: "Death to Judah"/ So the flag says/ "Judah will live forever"/ So the light answers)

On Chanukah, whoever is lighting the menorah will first light the shamash, then the number of candles corresponding to whichever night of Chanukah it is. The first night, only the rightmost candle is lit, the second night the two rightmost, etc. (The newest candle is always lit first):

Again, a valid Chanukah menorah has eight branches of equal length, along with a shamash. There is no such thing as a Chanukah menorah with six branches of equal length and a longer seventh branch, and no valid Chanukah menorah has eight branches of completely different lengths.

If you see either of the above designs (or anything similar) on Chanukah-themed decor, it tells you the creator has absolutely no idea what they're doing and couldn't be bothered to do more than two seconds of research to make sure their product was accurate. Anyone who knows anything about the holiday will laugh at these. (They may buy them anyway, especially if that's all that's available-- my new Chanukah sweater has an invalid menorah pattern, but it's adorable, so I'm still going to wear it. But I am also laughing about it and invite you all to do the same.)

Anyway, have a happy Chanukah, everyone!