Christmas Day, marking the birth of Jesus Christ, will also mark the first night of Hanukkah, the Jewish holiday that commemorates the rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem nearly two centuries before, in a rare joint occurrence.
Christmas is observed on the 25th of December, and Hanukkah (also spelled Chanukah) falls on the 25th day of the Jewish month of Kislev. But the Christian world uses a solar calendar, while the Jewish calendar is both solar and lunar.
The lunar year is eleven days shorter than the solar year, meaning that Jews add an extra month once every several years — a leap year — to keep the holidays in the same season. (The Islamic world, whose calendar is lunar, observes its holidays earlier and earlier every year, without exception.)
Once every 19 years, the pattern brings the Jewish calendar and the solar calendar back to the exact same point: thus, the last “Chrismukkah” was in 2005. Though the holidays often overlap, it is only this year — and every 19 years after that — that the first night of Hanukkah is also on Christmas Day.
In 2016, Hanukkah started on Christmas Eve, another form of “Chrismukkah.”
(The coincidence of Hanukkah and Thanksgiving also occurs, but is even more rare, because Thanksgiving is not on a set date, but rather the last Thursday in November.)
In Israel, the joint celebration of Christmas and Hanukkah led to several joint celebrations, notably in the city of Haifa, where Jews and Arabs live together with relatively little trouble.
The coastal city is home to Jews, Christians, and Muslims, as well as the Ahmadiyya sect of Muslims (who are persecuted in parts of the Muslim world) and the international headquarters of the Baha’i faith (which is persecuted by the Islamic regime in Iran, where it began).
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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