I’m spending the second Hanukkah away from my partner and alone. I hate it.

Maybe this is a weird post as I’m not Jewish. My partner is Jewish and I’m christian, while we don’t celebrate all the different festivals together (just conflicting beliefs that we respect each other for) there’s a lot of festivals we do celebrate together. Hanukkah being one of them. I returned to the UK in late 2019 due to complicated health issues and we would take it in turns to travel to each other each month while she remained living in Tanzania to continue the work we were doing. Shortly before the pandemic hit she moved to a remote area in India as we had planned for another project and we’ve been unable to see each other since. We remotely celebrate festivals together but this time it’s really hitting me different. Due to my health I’m immuno-compromised so I will be facing christmas alone also and last night as we said goodbye after both lighting our candles and saying our prayers I just broke down and I’ve not recovered since. I guess we still light our candles at the same time, we sing and pray together, we’ve maintained our charity traditions through all this but it’s not the same. She’s also the cook in this relationship, she will cook incredible food even when I suggest we just pick up snacks. As I’m fairly sure I’ll burn the house down with cooking so it doesn’t even smell like hanukkah. There’s a marketing idea. We see so many “christmas smells” candles on the shelves every year, where are the ones that smell of potato in hot oil?

I’m sorry, all of this was just a vent and ramble. I’m just feeling down because hanukkah still just isn’t the same for me as it was before this pandemic. Stay safe everyone and happy hanukkah! <3