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Candles, latkes, action: It's "Hanukkah Lights," with stories of the season from NPR. Join hosts Susan Stamberg and Murray Horwitz for original work from Andy Borowitz, Theodore Bikel, Anne Burt and Debra Ginsberg, plus a classic from the "Hanukkah Lights" vault by Erika Dreifus.

Whether you like your Hanukkah tales humorous or historical, magical or true-to-life, there's something for you in this brand-new collection of holiday stories.

Listen to the full hour-long special above, or hear individual "Hanukkah Lights" stories below.

Hear The Stories

"The First Hanukkah"

Listen to the Story

7 min 7 sec

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Courtesy of the author

Courtesy of the author

by Andy Borowitz

Andy Borowitz is a New York Times best-selling author and a comedian who has written for The New Yorker since 1998. In 2001, he created the Borowitz Report, a satirical news column with millions of readers around the world, for which he won the first-ever National Press Club award for humor. The Borowitz Report was acquired by The New Yorker in 2012. He has published two recent best-selling books: The 50 Funniest American Writers, which became the first title in the history of the Library Of America to make the Times best-seller list, and a memoir, the No. 1 best-seller An Unexpected Twist, which Amazon named the Best Kindle Single of 2012. He has been called a "Swiftian satirist" (Wall Street Journal), "America's satire king" (The Daily Beast), "the funniest human on Twitter" (The New York Times), and "one of the funniest people in America" (CBS News' Sunday Morning).

Borowitz's "Hanukkah Lights" story lives up to his billing: It's a comic attempt at a better-late-than-never Hanukkah.

"For The Ghosts"

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12 min 50 sec

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Courtesy of the author

Courtesy of the author

by Anne Burt

Anne Burt's fiction has appeared in Meridian Literary Magazine (2003 Editors' Prize In Fiction), among other literary publications, including the Fall 2014 issue of Referential Magazine. She has published numerous essays, including commentary for NPR's All Things Considered and Talk Of The Nation. She is the editor of the essay collection My Father Married Your Mother, as well as co-editor (with Christina Baker Kline) of the essay collection About Face. Burt received a B.A. from Yale University and an M.A. in Creative Writing from New York University. She is currently working on two connected novellas, titled The Collectibles.

Burt's "Hanukkah Lights" story, "For The Ghosts," describes every Jewish mother's nightmare (and her dream).

"The Only Miracle"

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11 min 29 sec

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Courtesy of the author

Courtesy of the author

by Debra Ginsberg

Debra Ginsberg is the author of three memoirs, including Waiting: The True Confessions Of A Waitress and Raising Blaze, and four novels, including Blind Submission and the award-winning The Grift. She reviews books for The San Diego Union-Tribune, The Washington Post Book World and Shelf Awareness, and has contributed to NPR's All Things Considered. Ginsberg has worked as a freelance editor for more than 20 years. She lives in San Diego, literally surrounded by family. When not writing, editing, reading, walking on the beach or bantering with her son, she bakes world-famous confections and tarts.

Ginsberg's contribution to "Hanukkah Lights" is a dream of a story, evoking the wonder of a miracle and the heartbreak of miracles that don't take.

"The City Of Light"

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6 min 56 sec

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Courtesy of the artist

by Theodore Bikel

There's nowhere near enough room here to list Theodore Bikel's accomplishments. A legendary folksinger; theater, film and television actor; radio host; president of Actors' Equity; political activist; Jewish spokesman; and author, Bikel has traveled the world into his 90s, performing, speaking and singing. From The African Queen to Star Trek: The Next Generation, his versatility speaks for itself.

For "Hanukkah Lights," Bikel offers a new story that recalls a Marc Chagall painting.

"Fidelis"

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14 min 6 sec

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Courtesy of the author

by Erika Dreifus

Two years after Pearl Harbor, exhausted Marines on a tiny Pacific island find hope in a moment of unexpected light. Dreifus is the author of Quiet Americans, a story collection inspired by the experiences of her paternal grandparents, German Jews who came to the U.S. in the late 1930s.

Jeb Bush, the former Republican governor of Florida and the brother and son of two former U.S. presidents, has essentially kicked off the 2016 presidential campaign with pre-announcement announcement on Facebook.

Saying he had conversations with his family about the future of the country, Bush said he had decided to "actively explore" a presidential run.

He went on:

"In January, I also plan to establish a Leadership PAC that will help me facilitate conversations with citizens across America to discuss the most critical challenges facing our exceptional nation. The PAC's purpose will be to support leaders, ideas and policies that will expand opportunity and prosperity for all Americans.

"In the coming months, I hope to visit with many of you and have a conversation about restoring the promise of America.

"Best wishes to you and your families for a happy holiday season. I'll be in touch soon."

On the Democratic side, everyone is, of course, waiting on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to make a move.

election 2016

Jeb Bush

The spending bill in Congress is not just about money. Tucked inside the bill are provisions to change regulations affecting everything from banking to the environment. One regulatory rollback has those concerned about truck safety especially upset.

The regulation is part of a series of rules that spell out the number of hours that long-haul truck drivers, the ones behind the wheel of the big rigs on the interstates, can be on the road.

Last year, a rule took effect that required those drivers to take two consecutive nights off after every 70 hours they spend behind the wheel.

The trucking industry, which didn't like the requirement in the first place, said it had an unintended consequence: It forced more truckers to take to the road early in the morning, when commuters and school buses are out.

"Those hours are less safe statistically," says Dave Osiecki, vice president of the American Trucking Association. "They're trying to reduce nighttime crashes? They may be causing daytime crashes."

The Two-Way

'Cromnibus' Spending Bill Passes, Just Hours Before Deadline

No one knows yet if that rule caused the number of crashes to increase; the Department of Transportation hasn't compiled accident data for the past year. But Osiecki says truck crashes had been declining before the rule took effect.

He says the regulation has also hurt industry profits.

"You're talking about $1 billion in lost productivity to this industry," Osiecki says.

7 Things You Didn't Know Were In The 'Cromnibus'

So the association and its congressional allies wrote a provision into the spending bill, undoing the rule, at least temporarily.

The Obama administration opposed the change, saying that driver fatigue is a leading factor in large truck crashes, which killed more than 3,500 people in 2012. Safety groups are angry, too.

"It stinks," says Daphne Izer, who founded Parents Against Tired Truckers after her son and three of his friends were killed by a truck driver who had fallen asleep behind the wheel on Maine's turnpike.

"Drivers will be allowed to drive up to 82 hours a week," Izer says. "That's insane. That's twice the normal work week, and drivers don't get paid overtime. It's going to be more death and destruction on our highways."

The provision in the spending bill also calls for a detailed study of the effect of the regulations on truck crashes. The measure only rolls back the new rules until next October, when both sides expect to resume their arguments.

Yes, we know the 2008 presidential election is years in the past and will not come around again. The question is, does Sen. Ted Cruz know this?

The question arises because the junior senator from Texas, in hot pursuit of the presidency, has chosen a trail blazed by Barack Obama six years ago. Obama was in the midst of his first Senate term when he barged into a field that featured Hillary Clinton, then a second-term senator from New York, and several other seasoned veterans of national politics. The word was audacity, and it was right there in the title of Obama's book.

When the upstart from Illinois emerged the Democratic nominee that summer and the winner in November, many foresaw a wave of emulation. We now have Cruz, the constitutional crusader, generating White House buzz in just his second year in office, just as Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts does ditto on the left. And that's not to mention old-timers like Rand Paul and Marco Rubio, running hard for national notice as they finish their fourth year in the Senate.

Few now recall the days when senators and governors felt they needed the credential of at least one re-election before launching themselves at the White House. That notion now seems as ancient as the 19th century bromide about how "the office seeks the man."

Even in this age of galloping ambition, the 43-year-old Cruz rides ahead of the pack. While Obama liked to quote Martin Luther King's line about "the fierce urgency of now," Cruz seeks to embody it at every turn. He speaks for those conservatives most fiercely urgent about battling the current president at every available moment. He has made their cause his own. He did it in October 2013, when he engineered a brief and partial shutdown of the federal government over Obamacare. This past weekend, he tried to do it again.

This time, the immediate target was Obama's recent executive action deferring deportation for more than 4 million immigrants in the U.S. illegally. Calling it "executive amnesty," Cruz insisted on resisting the bipartisan budget deal that would fund immigration operations through February (and the rest of the federal government through September). Never mind that Republican leaders of the House and Senate had negotiated the deal with their Democratic counterparts and the president, and never mind that a bipartisan majority in the Senate planned to proceed with it.

Like every senator, Cruz is entitled to vote any way he wishes on the budget deal. Warren, among others, joined him in opposing it. But Cruz wanted also to force a point of order on the constitutionality of a budget that pays for a policy Cruz regards as unconstitutional. And he wanted the Senate to stay in session all weekend to deal with both issues, regardless of long-laid plans for this pre-holiday weekend.

Cruz, in just two years as the Hotspur of the Senate floor and committee rooms, may have already set a record for rapid alienation of colleagues – on both sides of the aisle. But his latest foray produced a new low in his intramural relations. His confreres did not appreciate either his freelancing or the self-righteous disdain he showed for their distress.

But beyond that, Cruz proved heedless in another way with real consequences. By forcing a Saturday session, he created extra innings of Senate floor time not anticipated by McConnell. And that opened a window of procedural opportunity for Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid, who used it to advance two dozen controversial presidential appointments. These nominations might have languished when Republicans took over as the Senate majority in January. Now, they are poised to win approval by the Democrats in the waning hours of their majority status. They include a new surgeon general, a new head of the immigration agency and a batch of federal judges who may be on the bench for decades.

Cruz's office asserts that Reid would have moved as many nominees as he could regardless of what Republicans did. And the Texas senator can maintain that none of the fallout from his disruption really matters when compared to the principles at stake. Surely there are those who agree and honor him for his stand. But if he is also counting on being a martyr and a hero in the eyes of party activists – the people who will choose the party's next leader — he may find his timing is off.

The Obama example is a powerful goad to the young and the driven in both parties, just as John F. Kennedy's was to another generation of politicians half a century ago. But will voters in 2016 be looking for another gifted orator from Harvard Law to rise from the Senate's back benches?

After eight years of a president who reached the pinnacle of power almost overnight, the country may be looking for something different. As a candidate, Obama was inspiring — an avatar of youth and idealism. As president, he has often seemed less than fully up to the task, lacking the savvy and personal political skills that might have helped him succeed.

In 2016, some may be looking for another telegenic sensation who has just burst on the scene — too big for the confines of one statehouse, or too dynamic to stew in the Senate. But as a rule, in choosing presidents, American voters have alternated between older faces and younger, between the fresh and the familiar, and between the rousing and the reassuring.

It will not take much study to decide which kind of candidate is on offer in Mr. Cruz.

Sen. Ted Cruz

2016 Republican presidential nomination

2016 presidential election