Chanukah, Day 4

To make up for my recent lack of attention to this blog, I’m posting thoughts about Chanukah for each day of the eight-day festival. Today, I’m talking about:

SEVIVON

Don McLean wrote a song about it.

On the each of the four vertical sides of the spinning top cube is a single letter that stand for a word in a sentence:

נ – N	נס – Nes	miracle
ג – G	גדול – Gadol	big
ה – H	היה – Haya	was
פ – P	פה – Po	here

In other words: A big miracle happened here.

But that’s only in Israel. In other countries, the last letter is ש – Sh, standing for שם – Sham, meaning: there.

I’m not sure I’ve ever played with a sevivon, but there’s a tradition of playing with it while the candles are alight, usually trying to win chocolate money or low denomination coins.