One of the many wonderful things about Chanukah is that it lasts eight days and gets better as each day goes on. The same can’t be said about Pesach, frankly. But then I suppose that depends on your perspective.

In our house this week, as we prepare (mentally) for Chanukah, we’ve had the “my favourite festival” conversation.

Second daughter loves Pesach best of all. Possibly because she’s never had to clean, shop and cook for a family: she “helps” but her help is not — it’s fair to say — something to be relied on. Succot in England is weather-dependent and also whether-you-actually-put-up-a-succah-dependent.

I met an Alaskan Jew once (they call themselves the “Frozen Chosen”); she told me about thick snow on the ground and Succahs with ingenious roofs and heaters. I had to put fluffy socks on just hearing about it. I’ve never been mad about Succot (or Sock-ot as I’d call it if I were her); even when I lived in Israel with a Succot-loving husband, it wasn’t my favourite.

Seeing Jerusalem’s empty streets on Yom Kippur is incredible, and Purim in Jerusalem is a joy, but Purim in North London seems to involve ensuring the community’s plastered young adults stay safe and alive until morning.

Purim outside of a thriving Jewish community is quite sad, really. There can’t be many holidays in which drinking, dressing up, letting off bangers and stink bombs, shooting cap guns, spraying your hair green, eating your body weight in carbs and giving baskets of food are expected, accepted and even obligatory.

Shavuot and Rosh Hashanah have been sunny in the UK for years, which makes them garden-friendly, but for those who keep Shabbat, three-dayers can be tough.

Chanukah requires no major overhaul of the home, no putting away of pots, no hut construction, no caffeine-reduction or disproportionate dread of a 24-hour fast, no screens off, no car keys hung up. Some love Chanukah for that; some find it lacking for precisely those reasons.

I’m focusing on the practical rather than spiritual aspects of the holidays and, essentially, contemplating their longevity, but that’s interesting, too. The first thing God sanctified in creation was time — the seventh day.

Time is honoured in festivals and the new moon, too. In his beautiful book The Sabbath, Abraham Joshua Heschel states that honouring a day in time distinguishes Judaism from other religions, which sanctify places (mountains, rivers) and objects (idols, predominantly).

It makes sense that people repeatedly turfed out of countries and denied land ownership sanctify time and not space.

And, of course, there’s a debate about this. Rambam believes nothing is inherently holy — not a place, so not Israel, and not objects, so not the tablets bearing the ten commandments, the Temple or the Western Wall. He says what we do in that place imbues it with holiness.

Others disagree, asserting there are levels of holiness: Israel, they argue, is indeed holier than other lands; Jerusalem is holier than other cities; and the Holy of Holies of the Temple was the holiest place of all.

When God appears to Moses in a burning bush and says, “Take off your shoes: the place on which you stand is holy ground”, Rambam believes the presence of God is what makes the ground holy; others that the ground itself, Mount Sinai, where the Jewish people were given the Torah, is holy in and of itself.

I like this debate because I love time and space. I have a degree in Philosophy as well as English, don’t forget. And I’ve visited Mount Kailash in remote western Tibet, sacred to five of the world’s religions, source of four of Asia’s longest rivers and the sole peak mountaineers are still forbidden to climb. It seems holy but is it? Can anything be?

Either way, the Chanukah lights are a perfect example of time meeting space. We light physical candles on a physical menorah in a specific spot in our home — all space related. It lasts eight days, from 25th Kislev, and the candles burn for a precise duration — all time related.

The number of candles grows daily, and in the temporary light of those flames we are reminded of permanence: of something much bigger than us, of all those who lit Chanukah candles before us, of our resilience across the centuries, of those we’ll pass this tradition on to in return, and of that little light burning in the darkness, despite the odds.

An eternal element — fire — shares its light as it illuminates small, individual wicks for a brief but beautiful moment.

And surely the analogies in that burn oh so very brightly.
Wishing you all a very happy Chanukah.