Source: The Boston Herald
On December 6, 1999, The Boston Herald published on article on Jewish teens who are rejecting the practice of receiving gifts during Hanukkah. Laura Robbins, a teen from Newton, Massachusetts, stated: "I asked my parents a few years ago not to get me presents...Yeah, it sounds weird, but I wanted to let them know that giving gifts isn't what the holiday is all about." Ariela Housman, a 14-year-old from Brookline, MA, has also asked her parents not to get her any Hanukkah gifts: "Hanukkah is about miracles; more specifically, it's about the Jews reclaiming their temple, and celebrating their solidarity." Rabbi Daniel L. Lehmann, headmaster of the New Jewish High School in Waltham, MA, stated that there are a small group of students in his school who have sworn off receiving gifts and find the commercialism of the holiday offensive: "These are the kids who see more of the religious layers of the holiday...Hanukkah is an anti-assimilation holiday, a celebration of Jewish independence and liberation. It's really sad on some level that it's become so commercialized."