I'm excited to see my four-year-old granddaughter, the lovely Princess Avigail, this Hanukkah. She knows Hebrew--alas, I don't. So I am studying up on how to play the dreidel game. As I understand it, we'll take turns spinning the four-sided top--the dreidel-- and depending which Hebrew letter comes up (see the chart above) we'll gain or lose our tokens-- money, or M&M's, or raisins. The person who is left with no tokens is out of the game.
The Hebrew letters on the dreidel stand for the words translated as "A great miracle happened there," which refers to the two thousand year old legend of the one jug of oil which would normally have been enough to light the menorah for only one day, but which miraculously lasted eight days during the purifying of the temple in the time of the Maccabees.
My friend Ted sent me this wonderful You-tube video of a cowboy version of the dreidel song--you gotta go there now!
