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Jewish law does not prescribe any special feasting or elaborate meal for Hanukkah as it does for other holidays.

Maybe this is because the origin of Hanukkah is not in the Bible but in the Apocrypha, the books of literature written between the second century BCE and the second century CE that were not incorporated into the Hebrew Bible.

The Books of Maccabees, of which there are actually four separate books, only say that the hero, Judah, "ordained that the days of dedication of the altar should be kept in their season from year to year by the space of eight days from the first and 20th day of the month Chislev, with mirth and gladness."

From Israel have come two popular foods for Hanukkah-sufganiyot or jelly doughnuts and ponchikot, which are ball-shaped or resemble a doughnut hole. Gil Marks, in "The World of Jewish Desserts," writes that doughnuts fried in oil, ponchikot, were adopted by Polish Jews for Hanukkah. The name is taken from the Polish word, paczki, which led to the nickname, ponchiks, the Polish name for jelly doughnuts.

Sufganiyot have a more interesting history. In "The Jewish Holiday Kitchen," Joan Nathan, an acquaintance of mine from our Jerusalem days and noted cookbook author and maven of American Jewish cooking, said she learned the origins of sufganiyot from Dov Noy, dean of Israel folklorists.

Noy relates a Bukhharian fable, which says the first sufganiya was a sweet given to Adam and Eve as compensation after their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. He says the word sufganiya comes from the Hebrew word, sof (meaning end), gan (meaning garden) and Ya (meaning God). Thus the word means, the end of God's garden.

According to Noy, this fable was created at the beginning of the 20th century, since sufganiya is a new Hebrew word coined by pioneers.

Some say sufganiyot, which means sponge like, are reminiscent of the sweet, spongy cookie called sufganne, a fried dough, popular along the Mediterranean since the time of the Maccabees. Hebrew dictionaries say the word actually comes from the Greek word, sufgan, meaning puffed and fried.

John Cooper, author of "Eat and Be Satisfied-A Social History of Jewish Food" has another theory. He says Christians in Europe ate deep-fried pastries on New Year's Eve, and Christians in Berlin ate jelly doughnuts. From them, German Jews started eating apricot-filled doughnuts. When they immigrated to Palestine in the 1930s, they encouraged the population to eat the jelly doughnuts for Hanukkah.

The doughnuts are said to have three characteristics: 1) they are round like the wheel of fortune; 2) they have to be looked at for what is inside not for their external qualities; and 3) they cannot be enjoyed the same way twice.

Whatever their origin, sample the real thing and you won't forget it!

Sybil Kaplan is a journalist, book review, lecturer, food writer, author of three Jewish children's books, and synagogue librarian from Overland Park, Kan.