By Lemony Snicket
A deadpan, faintly ridiculous tale of a screaming potato pancake that insists, at the top of its lungs, that Hanukkah is not Christmas.
A latke is fried up in hot oil and, understandably, comes out screaming. It leaps from the pan and races through a snowy town, and everyone it meets, a string of flashing lights, a candy cane, a family by a pine tree, cheerfully mistakes it for something to do with Christmas. The latke keeps screaming that no, it is a latke, a Hanukkah food, and it is not any of those things. It's Lemony Snicket at his driest, a very silly, slightly morbid little book that's really a wink at grown-ups about how Hanukkah gets swallowed up by Christmas every December.
This is the gift for the older child on the shelf, the seven-, eight-, nine-year-old who's ready for humor with a sly edge and an in-joke they can feel proud of getting. It's funny in that Lemony Snicket deadpan way, and underneath the silliness it makes a sharp, true little point that lands especially for a Jewish family: Hanukkah is its own holiday, not a Jewish version of Christmas. It ends abruptly and a bit strangely, which is the joke. Read it as a wink and it's a delight.