722nd Friday Blog Roundup

It’s Chanukkah this week.  I am not a fan of Chanukkah, though I’ll never say no to my mother’s latkes or the sufganiyot my cousin brings me.  Other than light the menorah, we don’t really do anything else to mark the holiday.

I wrote this several years ago for BlogHer, but that site is gone, so I’ll post it here:

So this is what Chanukkah is about: it’s a somewhat insignificant holiday meant to commemorate the time that King Antiochus instated laws not allowing Jews to practice their religion and the Maccabees fought back. It’s a story about guerrilla warfare and a revolution. About not waiting for G-d to intercede on your behalf, but fighting back against injustice. It is about a time when life sucked hardcore for the Jews and instead of putting down their heads and crying, they rolled up their sleeves and restored the Temple.

In other words, it’s a pretty cool holiday on its own, but where gifts and sweetness have a place in a birthday celebration for Christ, presents and candy don’t really commemorate a war. Jews don’t celebrate war victories — recognizing that death is a large part of war — so this holiday is more about relief than outright joy. It would make more sense to use Chanukkah to go into the community and right a few wrongs. Or do a habitat for humanity-like project to fix up a home in need of repair. See, it’s not really a holiday that can be celebrated like Christmas.

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Chanukkah is a holiday about fighting assimilation, so it’s sort of weird that a holiday about fighting assimilation has become assimilated in order to be more like the majority holiday close on the calendar. Jews should be proud of the holiday — it’s essentially a story of thanksgiving — and pump up the parts that matter: family, friends, and fried foods.

So, yes to the family, friends, and fried foods.  No to the rest of it.  Which means a really quiet week, holiday-wise.

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Stop procrastinating.  Go make your backups.  Don’t have regrets.

Seriously.  Stop what you’re doing for a moment.  It will take you fifteen minutes, tops.  But you will have peace of mind for days and days.  It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• None… sniff…

Okay, now my choices this week.

No Kidding in NZ has done it.  If you’ve read her blog, you know that she always has sound advice up her sleeve.  She pulled together an e-book of thoughts from the blog and quotations and beautiful images.  It’s comfort in paper form.  I especially love the quote about remembering without pain.  You can order the book from that link.

In Quest of a Binky Moongee is looking for a preschool for her twins when she encounters a very strange wording on the application.  The application asks if she is the “natural” parent, and she doesn’t know what to answer after their experience with surrogacy.  “What do we circle? I mean technically I am not my twins’ ‘natural’ parent. And we did need to get step-parent adoption in order for me to be legally their mother. But do we circle Parent/Step-parent? What if they ask us about the ‘natural’ mother?”  It’s a strange wording that people who conceive without difficulty probably don’t think twice about, but it sticks out for anyone who has built their family with assistance.

HopefullyMyLinesNow (old blog, new name) has a post about how pregnancy is different due to so many losses.  She points out all the ways she wanted things to go with pregnancy and the delivery, and how she has had to adapt.  She writes, “Why do I feel compelled not to grieve over all the hopes that won’t be met simply because I’ve known worse grief? I realize that loss has taken so much away from me, and now I’m letting my knowledge and associated guilt force me to adapt in ways I don’t want to adapt.”  It is about the endless act of letting go of (or adjusting) hopes and dreams.

Lastly, Life Without Baby has a post about being sideswiped by sadness when grief comes out of nowhere.  She writes, “The point is that sometimes, even when we’re sure we have it together, even when we’ve done the grief work, even when we’ve cried an ocean and think there’s nothing left to resolve, sometimes we just get sideswiped.”  Go over and join the conversation about your experience.

The roundup to the Roundup: A very quiet Chanukkah.  Your weekly backup nudge.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between November 30th and December 7th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.