My favorite type of Christmas songs are the sad ones. From classics like “Last Christmas,” to Darlene Love’s “Christmas (Please Come Home)” (fun fact: Love also gave us the delightful SNL skit “Christmastime for the Jews”), to newer songs like Aimee Mann’s “Calling on Mary” and Kacey Musgraves’ “Christmas Always Makes Me Cry.” I love that these are songs that kind of lean into the darker feelings many people feel around the holiday season. From those who might not have a partner or loved ones to spend it with, to those grieving or struggling with something heavy, to those who just feel that the expectation to be merry and cheerful is more of a burden than a joy.
Hanukkah isn’t Christmas, and sometimes that’s a good thing — it doesn’t come with the same emotionally and fiscally pricey expectations of all-out cheer — but it can also be melancholy in different ways. Because of the way it makes us feel othered, maybe, in a world full of red and green. Because winter just is generally a time when we’re more prone to sadness and desolation. Because sometimes the expectation of celebrating light when the world feels dark is just too hard. That’s why discovering Rosi Golan’s soulful “Eight Nights” a few years ago on Apple’s Hanukkah playlist felt like such a gift to me. It’s a Hanukkah song that channels the sadness and the longing in my favorite Christmas songs, but holds within it such Jewish light. It felt like a song made specifically for me.
The Israel-born indie singer Golan has had her music featured in shows like “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Vampire Diaries”, and she co-wrote “Loyal Brave True” for Christina Aguilera for the live-action adaptation “Mulan.” This Hanukkah song is in the same vein as Golan’s many hits.
“Eight Nights” is not a particularly sad song; rather, it’s nostalgic and filled with longing, lulling us through our holiday. Its chorus does channel some of that bittersweet otherness we feel on Hanukkah — we don’t get to participate in the big brouhaha of Christmas, but we get our own little lights: “All my friends have evergreens and figurines/All my friends hang mistletoe on Christmas Eve/But I’ve got eight nights, eight lights in December/I’ve got eight nights in December.”
On dark nights in November and December, since I’ve discovered Golan’s songs, I like to put it on while driving to run errands. It’s the perfect cathartic song to release your feelings, and I can’t help but feel a little misty-eyed with Golan sings about Hanukkah traditions: sweet red wine and dreidels and telling stories about how “Light gave us hope when we thought it ran out/Brightened the dark now it glows all around/And it shines forever faithful.” It captures oh-so-beautifully what it feels like to look at those Hanukkah candles shining bright. And it reminds me of all the little lights connecting us as a people to Jewish family and to the Jewish story — so full of moments when we thought hope had run out, but then we found it again, like a miracle, like this gorgeous song.
