Actually Chanukah started yesterday, December 10. this year and will end on December 18. Thinking about Chanukah and other Jewish festivals always reminds me of the year I spent teaching in upstate New York. Monticello, New York was, and I'm sure still is, a lovely little city in the Catskills. It's population was fifty percent Jewish, thirty percent black and the rest of us. It was a real learning experience for a young art teacher from a small town in Indiana and my first exposure to being a minority. And speaking of learning experiences, I learned that you never put a white Star of David on a green background. When my good friend, fellow teacher, and guide to all things Jewish, Sam explained this to me I had to completely take apart what I thought was a really good Winter Festival bulletin board showing a Christmas wreath around a Star of David. It went with the Holiday tree set up in the entrance hall. Happily, I was able to reconstruct the bulletin board as planned but with a blue background. The reason I was doing the bulletin board was because early in the school year, I spotted the school principal struggling to put together a bulletin board and asked him if he would like me to do the monthly bulletin boards. I thought he was going to fall down on his knees in gratitude. Since most of my job all through college was designing bulletin boards it really wasn't a hardship. One day I caught the principal taking a photograph of one of my bulletin boards. He told me he had been taking pictures of all of them, just in case he ever had to go back to doing them himself. I hope he was able to use them when I moved back home to get married.
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