By John Przybys, Las Vegas Review-Journal

It’s a once-in-a-lifetime event that might just rank up there with the return of Halley’s Comet, Super Bowl III or the Apollo 11 moonwalk.

Call it (as many already have) Thanksgivukkah, the confluence that arrives this week of the secular holiday of Thanksgiving and the beginning of the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah.

Hanukkah this year begins at sunset Wednesday. So, Thanksgiving will mark the first full day of Hanukkah, and that’s a combination of words no one sees, or will see, very often.

Hanukkah and Thanksgiving last shared the same date during the 1800s, although, technically, there wasn’t a national Thanksgiving Day holiday back then. And it won’t come again, according to some estimates for another 77,000 years or so.

Given both Thanksgivukkah’s rarity and its novelty, it’s not surprising that Americans — never ones to miss a chance to celebrate something new — have jumped all over it.

Commemorative T-shirts? Check. Collectible doodads? Check. Hanukkah turkey menorahs? Check (seriously).

But beyond all of the novelty and well-meaning fun is a more practical question: How do you do a Thanksgiving-Hanukkah mashup when there’s no real precedent for anyone having done one before?

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