AMERICAN:

Fifteen minutes and three marching bands later, a large float of a blue dreidel resting on a platform resembling a golden Hanukkah coin passed by. Here, the reaction was somewhat different. "It's a dreidel," a mother in a woolen beanie explained to her daughter, capturing the parade on her cellphone.

Hannukah and its symbols have become a staple of American popular culture, but rarely do they converge with Thanksgiving, a national holiday that American Jews hold particularly dear, creating the new 2013 hybrid holiday of Thanksgivukkah. This fuzzy combo, everyone knows, will not occur again for over 70,000 years.

Alex Herko, a marketing student from Burlington, Vermont, immediately recognized the outsize toy as it drifted down Avenue of the Americas. He said that for the average American, the dreidel may even be better known as a Jewish symbol than the Star of David.

"Even being Catholic, everybody knows the song 'dreidel, dreidel, dreidel, I made you out of clay,'" Herko said. "I can distinctly remember making dreidels in the third or fourth grade."

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