It's deeply ironic that Chanukah, which ostensibly celebrates the victory of Jewish fundamentalists,
- Started as a Hellenistic-style military victory commemoration holiday.
- Incorporated pagan solstice light-kindling which was meant to bring back the sun through sympathetic magic.
- Has dreidel as one of its iconic celebratory activities, which was adopted whole from the popular Christmastime game T-totum (the story of the Jews playing dreidel while hiding from the Yevanim first shows up in writing in 1898!).
- Adopted gift-giving from the American version of Christmas in the '50s.
And most frum people think that all these things are authentically pure Torah-True traditions.
That said, I think Chanukah can be interpreted as a celebration of Jewish culture. It has it's origins in the last gasp of Jewish national independence (until the mid-20th century). It's thoroughly syncretistic, which Jewish culture has always been. And today, it's one of the things that differentiates Jews from everyone else, a small bulwark against the Christian hegemony that so thoroughly pervades Western culture that people think there is something inherently, qualitatively different about this time of year.
