Then, quietly, we took each others' hands, few and lonely, feeling that we were standing there against something, but also affirming something larger than ourselves, in ways we didn't know how to express. For eight nights there are candles to light, and words to say. And for eight nights Jews around the world will say a blessing meant to prod our memory and stir our historic consciousness to recall the triumph and glory of an age gone by. Enough for one day's light. It's a wonderful story.
Children love it.
There's only one problem. But it probably didn't happen that way at all. The first time that the story of a single cruise of oil lasting eight days appears is in the Talmud, four hundred years after the events themselves. There are sources that are contemporary with the events of the Maccabean revolt. They are called the First and Second Books of Maccabees.