Hanukkah word search

Pick a list: three by age, and one of the fried foods of the holiday. Every word can be changed, so add family names or a Hebrew school class's vocabulary. Set the grid size and the directions, then print. The key is on page two.

Sheet number is the seed, so the same words and number always give the same grid. One sheet a night? Print eight, each with a different number, and the family gets a fresh puzzle every evening of the festival.

Hanukkah celebrates the rededication of the Second Temple in Jerusalem by the Maccabees, after their revolt against the Seleucid Empire. The name comes from a Hebrew verb meaning to dedicate. It begins on the 25th of Kislev. It lasts eight nights.

Fried foods such as latkes, potato pancakes, and sufganiyot, jelly doughnuts, recall the small amount of oil that lasted eight days. Each night one more candle is lit, with the shamash, the attendant candle, lighting the others. The historian Josephus called the festival Lights, which is where Festival of Lights comes from.

For ages 5 to 7, keep to the 10 × 10 grid with words only across and down. Add diagonals from about 8. Backwards words are hardest.

Words go in longest first, each at a random spot that doesn't clash with letters already placed, and random letters fill the gaps. Filler can spell a short word by accident, so every word is checked after the fill and the filler rerolled until each appears exactly once. Spaces and punctuation are dropped inside the grid, so EIGHT NIGHTS is hidden as EIGHTNIGHTS.