1:49 a.m. I don't mean to kvetch, but I am so ferklempt. Already it's the first day of Chanukah and I've done bupkes to get ready.

Is tonight the potato latkes or the challa and honey? I get all furblungit with the details, coming as they often do, so close to the birth of the Baby Jesus. It's making me mishigas.

But what else can you expect from a shikse? Luckily, I'm married to a real mensch, so -- not to worry. We'll manage.

Tonight we light the first light to commemorate the miracle of the Feast of Lights. A timely story, you know, as we approach the possible shutdown of the industrialized world in just 28 more days. As I understand it, there was a tiny little bit of oil and it lasted and lasted and stayed lit for eight long nights. I don't know from the dreidel.

I'll be writing about the whole idea of lights at this time of the year for my World Year piece, which I'm determined I will write before the last possible hours on Sunday afternoon, so I'll only say here that I have, indeed, bought plenty of Hanukkah candles and a few extra votive lights for after the stroke of midnight exactly four weeks from tonight, should all hell break loose.

Not that many, though. If the power grid gets askadart we would indeed need a miracle to drive away the black night, but then -- isn't that always the case? Even in a roomful of light, some people can only see shadows.

You think that's a facacta idea? I have it on good authority -- you should be so smart -- at the turn of the last century Ernst Mach said: "The world consists only of our sensations ... in a depression the ego contracts and shrinks, and a wall seems to separate it from the world."*

Not so cacamaimey when you hear it expressed that way, eh? Feed the sensations; the intellect will follow.

Thus, the need for celebrations, for warm soup with kreplach to nosh on ... for the comfort of an increasingly brighter row of lights on the Hanukkah menorah. For the little manger scene that I like to have all arranged just so. Blessed Mother, shepherds, the Three Wise Men.

One of us in this mixed marriage is totally and utterly wrong, you know.

So, what to do? Do we unwrap chocolate tinfoil-covered gelt or celebrate ancient gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh? And what, exactly, is myrrh and why isn't it for sale at Target?

It takes chutzpah to be a Catholic these days. Will I be making a mitzvah or a mortal sin tonight? Should I be kvelling or caroling? Are we saying Mazel tov or Merry Christmas?

Oy gevalt, what we goyim go through.

* The rest of the quote is instructive: "The ego can be so extended as ultimately to embrace the entire world."

Contributions to the Analysis of the Senses, 1897.