The Pig Who Stole Hanukkah: A Novella
Every other holiday romance starts when they meet. This one starts when they don't.
Max Rosen falls in love over eight nights with someone whose face he never sees, whose voice he never hears, and whose name he doesn't learn until the last one.
The pig has been at this Hanukkah festival since 1990 - six feet of pink foam, property of the animal rescue, a joke Max's late grandmother found so funny she made it permanent. Five performers rotate the suit. The rescue never says who's inside. That's the rule, and Max has already asked.
He isn't charmed at first. He's eleven months into running his grandmother's festival on grief and color-coded binders, the community center is being sold out from under it, and a grocery chain wants to sponsor everything on terms that would quietly erase every vendor who's been showing up for forty years.
Then the pig fixes his string lights. Leaves a note he keeps on his refrigerator. Skates - competently, in rented skates - in front of the sponsor he's desperate to impress.
By night four, he's stopped pretending he isn't looking for it.
By night eight, the power fails over three hundred people in a dark square, and somebody has to take the mask off.
You'll know who's inside the suit long before Max does. That's the point. This isn't a mystery - it's the ache of watching two people fall for each other through thirty pounds of foam, both of them hiding, neither of them able to say so.
Eight nights. One suit. One secret.
A warm, funny, unabashedly Jewish holiday romance about grief, chosen family, an unresolvable dispute over applesauce versus sour cream, and the least kosher mascot in the borough. Closed door. Guaranteed happy ending. A complete standalone novel.
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