Free How I Saved Hanukkah by Amy Goldman Koss Page A

right.
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    My little brother, Ned, came charging out the front door, straight for me. He’s always deliriously happy tosee me after school. My mom says that’s why I don’t need a dog.
    “Guess who came to school?” Ned said, grabbing at the ends of my long hair. “Guess!”
    “Santa Claus,” I said.
    First Ned’s face caved in, disappointed that I had guessed. Then he looked at me with awe, because I was so brilliant.
    “I went to the same preschool, Neddy. Santa comes every year,” I said.
    “Oh.” Ned thought about that, then perked up. “Guess what he gave me!”
    I did not say, “A candy cane.” That would have been mean.
    “A CANDY CANE!” Ned said. He fished around in his grimy pocket with his grubby hand and pulled out a half-eaten, entirely slimed, candy cane. “Want some?” he offered.
    A fabulous sister might have pretended to take a lick and made extravagant yum-yum sounds. Instead I reached into my backpack and pulled out my blue-and-white tube sword.
    “Happy Hanukkah,” I said. “Ho ho ho.” No oneon earth would be excited by that crumpled scrap—except Ned. It must be nice to be three.
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    Ned jumped around, jabbing me with his wrinkled sword while I put on my Rollerblades. It occurred to me that he moved more like a tree frog than like any kind of mammal. I told him I’d be back before dinner, but still he watched me leave as if I was going off to war, on the moon.
    Rollerblading is the best feeling in the world. It is like sliding on a really smooth wood floor in socks, except better, because you go and go and you’re outside. My arms love it, my face loves it, even my hair loves it. And it’s hilly in California where I live, with lots of glorious downhills to fly.
    I’d had a great pre-dinner ride and was racing back home in the near-dark when Christmas lights started coming on at every house but ours. Lucy likes the pure white lights best, but I think the all-different-colored ones are perfect.
    When I asked why we can’t have Christmas lights, my mom said, “Because we’re Jewish.”
    “What’s that got to do with it?” I’d asked. “Theydon’t make you prove you’re Christian at the store when you try to buy lights.”
    As I zipped toward home, I thought about the Christmas lights. They reminded me again about being singled out at school. Here it was the first night of Hanukkah, but you’d never know it was anything special looking at my house. As I got closer, I saw how boring and sad it looked—the plain, dull frump at a ball full of dazzling princesses. I knew exactly how it must feel.

CHAPTER
2
    T his Hanukkah promised to be like all our other ones, only worse, because this time my dad wasn’t going to be home.
    My dad is a segment producer for a TV show, which means he makes pieces of the show, not the whole thing. They call his kind of show a “news magazine.” There are three or four segments for each show: Maybe one on some extra-nasty crime or some wacky cult, then one about an amazingly brave person with an icky disease, or some evil threat to the environment, and last, a “warm-fuzzy-feel-good segment,” as my dad calls them, “to calm everyone down enough to go to sleep.”
    Dad has been in the warm-fuzzy department a lot lately. The story he has been working on is about the sextuplets in Washington, D.C. That’s six babies who were born at once, out of one human mother.
    “That poor, poor woman,” Mom had said, way back when my dad first started filming the sextuplets. Since then Dad has flown to Washington to produce one sextuplet segment after another, and we are all sick to death of them.
    In the beginning he’d said the sextuplets looked like a bunch of pink raisins, and they sort of gave him the willies. Now he says they have “individual personalities” and HE can tell them all apart.
    “The network feels that if I stick Santa hats on all six heads, it will be a holiday hit,” my dad had said