Inspiration for Hanukkah and a quick menorah tutorial

Sharon from the sweet Israeli blog Gonna Be 40 invited me to write a Hannukah post for the 8 days of miracles series she has on her blog.

Since the original post is all in Hebrew, I translated it for you, and here it is in English...

So we're still licking our wounds from the huge summer vacation (plus almost another month of holidays for Rosh Hashana, that we had here in Israel), and now Hanukkah is knocking on our door. If you celebrate Hanukkah, I guess you also find yourself hosting a lot these days. Almost every day we have guests over – our friends, friends of the kiddos, family, neighbors – and we light candles in our 342 Hanukkah Menorah's (the kids are making maybe 100 of them every year!!!) and eat latkes and Hanukkah doughnuts. So to help you have the most amazing Hanukkah party, here's a round-up of some great Hanukkah ideas.

Oh, and how can you have a Hanukkah without a DIY menorah?… Scroll down to see an easy tutorial for a natural menorah.

 

So any good party needs some nice decorations, right? On the blog Style at Home you can find a cute tutorial for dreidel garland. Anyone said Christmas?…

And if you want to involve the kids in all the preparations, you can have them make these great dreidel paper dolls from the blog Bringing Chesed Home.

If you want your Hanukkah to look a bit like Christmas, here's a beautiful Hanukkah tree!

The Etsy shop FrogPrincePaperie offers DIY Hanukkah printables. The set includes a banner, cupcake toppers, cupcake wraps, dreidel boxes, food labels and more.

The most important moment of any Hanukkah party is the lighting of the menorah, of course. From all the menoras I've seen online, this one, from Aunt Peaches, is my favorite! I'm definitely making one this year!

For the snacks you can make marshmallow dreidels…

And even Hanukkah gelts (these cute chocolate coins), like the ones on Oh Nuts.

And you will need something to hold these coins. How about these dreidel boxes from Martha Stewart?

If you need more ideas, take a look at my Hanukkah Pinterest board.

Now, like I promised, a menorah tutorial.

The whole idea about this menorah is to look around you and use stuff that you can find in your surrounding. You can also follow my steps below, but feel free to go wild!

Search for a nice, straight branch. If it has a section taller than the other, it's even better, this is where your Shamash will go.

You can leave your menorah natural or paint it. My son wanted a colorful one, so we painted… You can use spray paint or acrylics.

Just like that -

Now find a pine cone, try to find one with scales open. Again, you can choose if to paint or leave it that way. If you decided to paint, you can paint now or after you disintegrate the scales (I'm lazy, so I painted before disintegrating it…).

Disintegrate the scales.

Assembly time. Use hot glue gun to glue 3 scales at a time in a flowery shape. Make 8 of these plus one Shamash.

In the center of each flower, glue a small, simple, candle holder.

That's it, your menorah is ready!

Happy Holidays!