Anyway!  Happy Festival of Lights!  Hope you have your menorah ready to light, latkes ready to burn,  dreidel ready to spin, and Hanukkah gelt ready not to eat and eventually just throw away a month from now.  It’s the most wonderful time of the (Jewish) year!  As such, enjoy this clip of Stephen Colbert listening to the merits of Hanukkah, and, ultimately, deciding it’s not for him:

For night #1 I received socks, which might sound hackneyed and lame but is actually a gift I look forward to every year.  Cause, hey, who can’t use a good pair of socks once a year?

But I received an even better gift later in the night:

Turns out that Community‘s Alison Brie is a member of the tribe! (for those of you who eschew for those puerile 22-minute network comedies you might  know her better as Mrs. Pete Campbell on Mad Men)  And don’t worry, I cross referenced with IMDB and Wikipedia to make sure Brie, and not just the character, is Jewish.  And it turns out that as a child she performed at the Los Feliz Jewish Center, just a hop, skip and a jump down the road from here!

Boy, they didn’t have girls like that at Temple Beth Shalom.