Hanukkah Emojis: A Night-by-Night List for 2026

Hanukkah emojis start and end with 🕎, the menorah, and the rest of the festival has to be assembled from parts. In 2026 Hanukkah begins at sundown on Friday 4 December and ends at nightfall on Saturday 12 December. This list gives you one line for each of the eight nights with the real date, plus the foods, colours and games, and what to use where Unicode has nothing.

That last part matters more than you'd think. There is no dreidel. There is no latke. We went looking.

Eight nights, eight lines: the 2026 candle list

Each line below matches the candle count for that evening. The 🕯️ glyphs count the night's candles; the shamash, the helper candle used to light the others, is implied by 🕎 at the front. Lighting happens in the evening, so the date is the evening you light.

1. Friday 4 December, night 1: 🕎🕯️ First light. Chag sameach!
2. Saturday 5 December, night 2: 🕎🕯️🕯️ Two down, after Shabbat ends.
3. Sunday 6 December, night 3: 🕎🕯️🕯️🕯️ Three candles and too many latkes.
4. Monday 7 December, night 4: 🕎🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️ Halfway. Who has the dreidel?
5. Tuesday 8 December, night 5: 🕎🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️ Five lit. The window is getting bright.
6. Wednesday 9 December, night 6: 🕎🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️ Six and counting 🍩
7. Thursday 10 December, night 7: 🕎🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️ One more night after this one.
8. Friday 11 December, night 8: 🕎🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️🕯️ All eight, then Shabbat candles. Happy Hanukkah!

If you'd rather keep it short, swap the candles for a keycap number: 🕎1️⃣, 🕎2️⃣ and so on up to 🕎8️⃣. It's tidier on a lock screen, and it sidesteps the fact that eight candle glyphs in a row wrap onto a second line on narrow phones.

Why both Fridays matter this year

2026 is unusual in that the first and the eighth nights both fall on a Friday. That changes the evening. Shabbat begins at sundown, and Jewish law doesn't permit lighting a flame once it has started, so on both Fridays the Hanukkah candles go on before the Shabbat candles, a little earlier than usual. The Shulchan Arukh (Orach Chaim 679:1) sets that order, and the candles have to be long enough to burn until half an hour after nightfall.

Saturday 5 December runs the other way. The second-night candles wait until Shabbat is over. A message timed for Friday afternoon, something like 🕎🕯️ + "lighting early tonight, Shabbat shalom 🕯️🕯️", shows you know the calendar. Nobody expects that from an emoji text, which is exactly why it lands.

🕎 is a nine-branched menorah, by name

The Unicode Consortium's formal name for U+1F54E is MENORAH WITH NINE BRANCHES. The short name you see on keyboards is just "menorah", but the full name is precise for a reason. The seven-branched menorah was the lamp of the Temple in Jerusalem; the nine-branched one, often called a hanukkiah, holds eight candles for the eight nights plus the shamash. My Jewish Learning's Hanukkah page uses both words for the festival lamp.

The emoji arrived in Emoji 1.0 in 2015, and designs vary. Emojipedia describes the usual design as a white menorah on a purple tile, the same treatment ✡️ and ☸️ get, and notes that earlier Google, Samsung and Facebook versions drew a literal candelabrum instead. Its description of the art is nine lit candles, matching the name. Our menorah emoji page lines the designs up.

On a real hanukkiah the shamash usually sits apart from the other eight, raised higher or set to one side, so it's never mistaken for one of the night's candles. No emoji design can show that distinction at chat size. That's why the candle-count lines above put 🕎 first and count the 🕯️ separately.

The basic Hanukkah emoji list

These are the characters that actually exist, with the release each one came from. Versions come from our own Unicode 18.0 catalog, not from vendor marketing:

• 🕎 menorah, Emoji 1.0 (2015)
• ✡️ star of David, Unicode 7.0 (2014)
• 🕯️ candle, Unicode 7.0 (2014)
• 🕍 synagogue, Emoji 1.0 (2015)
• 🍩 doughnut, from the 2010 set
• 🥔 potato, Emoji 3.0 (2016)
• 🪙 coin, Emoji 13.0 (2020)
• 🫓 flatbread, Emoji 13.0 (2020)
• 🧆 falafel, Emoji 12.0 (2019)
• 🫒 olive, Emoji 13.0 (2020)
• 💙 blue heart and 🤍 white heart

One trap: 🔯, the dotted six-pointed star, looks similar to ✡️ and isn't the same character. It came from Japanese phone sets, where it was associated with fortune telling. For anything Jewish, use ✡️. We cover this pair and others like it in our guide to duplicate-looking emoji.

What has no emoji (and what people send instead)

Our catalog holds 3,963 fully-qualified emoji as of Unicode 18.0. We ran the Hanukkah staples against its names, and this is the gap:

• Dreidel: nothing, not even a generic spinning top. 🎲 the game die is the common stand-in, though a die has six faces and a dreidel four. Our honest pick is to type the letters instead: נ ג ה ש. They stand for "nes gadol hayah sham", a great miracle happened there. In Israel the last letter is usually פ, for "po", here.
• Latke: no potato pancake. 🥔🍳 reads as "potato, fried" and does the job. 🥞 works if your crowd will take a joke, since most vendors draw a stack of breakfast pancakes with butter on top.
• Sufganiyah: 🍩 is the accepted shorthand even though the emoji shows a ring doughnut with a hole and sufganiyot are filled. Add 🍓 for the jam.
• Gelt: 🪙 coin plus 🍫 chocolate bar. Gelt is Yiddish for money, so the coin alone isn't wrong.
• Shamash: no separate candle. 🕯️ standing alone before a row is the closest you'll get.
• Applesauce and sour cream: 🍎 and 🥛, if you need to settle the latke topping argument.

Our game die emoji page and potato emoji page show how differently vendors draw both stand-ins, which matters if you're relying on them to carry the joke.

Oil, explained in four glyphs

Nearly every Hanukkah food is fried, and that's not an accident. The festival remembers the rededication of the Temple, and the story of a small jar of oil that lasted eight days. Fried food is the edible version of that story. A few lines built on it:

• 🫒🔥🕎Copy
• 🥔🍳🍎Copy
• 🍩🍓✨Copy
• 🫓🧆🫒Copy
• Latkes are on, come hungry 🥔🍳🕎

🫓 and 🧆 tilt the plate toward Israeli and Sephardi tables, where latkes aren't always the centre. Both are recent: falafel in 2019 and flatbread a year after. Our falafel emoji page has the art. For the doughnut, the doughnut emoji page shows how far the jam-filled ideal sits from what the vendors drew.

Blue and white: building the colour

Blue and white became Hanukkah's colours in the modern era, usually traced to the tallit and the Israeli flag, and they're the easiest way to make a set read as Hanukkah without a single candle in it. Some sets:

• 💙🤍💙🤍Copy
• 🕎💙✨Copy
• ✡️🤍💙Copy
• ❄️💙🕯️Copy
• 🔵⚪🕎Copy

💙 the blue heart carries most of the weight here. 🇮🇱 the Israeli flag is a political statement as well as a colour scheme, and many people will read it that way in a holiday greeting. Leave it out unless you mean it.

And think twice about ❄️. It assumes a northern winter. In Sydney, Melbourne or Johannesburg, Hanukkah falls in early summer, and a snowflake reads as a stock holiday graphic rather than anything to do with the person's actual evening. ☀️🕎 is a perfectly good southern-hemisphere opener, and it surprises people in exactly the right way.

Sets sorted by who's getting them

The same eight nights read differently depending on the chat. A few lines we'd actually send:

• Family group, first night: 🕎🕯️ Who's bringing the applesauce this year? 🍎
• A Jewish coworker: Happy Hanukkah, enjoy the eight nights 🕎✨. Keep it to one glyph pair at work; a row of candles in Slack looks like a bug report.
• A friend lighting alone: 🕯️🤍 Lighting with you from here tonight.
• Kids' cousins: 🎲🪙🍫 Gelt count update please.
• Someone who just hosted the party: 🥔🍳🙌 Those latkes were unreal.
• The last night: 🕎✨💙 Eight for eight. See you next year.

The rule we keep coming back to: one personal detail beats five extra emoji. Mentioning the applesauce, the cousin, or the friend's own menorah does more than any candle count can.

Custom dreidels on Discord and Slack

Because Unicode has no dreidel, community servers fill the gap themselves. Discord and Slack both let admins upload custom emoji, and public directories of Discord server emoji list dozens of animated spinning dreidels. They only work inside the server that uploaded them, though. Paste one into a text message or an email and the other person sees a word in colons, like :dreidel:, or nothing at all.

If you run a server, an uploaded dreidel is a nice December touch. Just don't rely on it outside that server. For portable messages the Hebrew letters remain the better bet, since every phone made in the last decade can render נ ג ה ש. Our guide to Slack, Discord and GitHub shortcodes explains how the standard names work on each platform and where custom ones break.

Greetings that go with the emoji

Short, all of them, because the glyphs do the rest:

• Happy Hanukkah 🕎✨
• Chag sameach! 🕎🕯️ (happy holiday)
• Chag urim sameach 🕎💙 (a happy festival of lights)
• חנוכה שמח 🕎 (Hanukkah sameach)
• Eight nights of light to you and yours 🕯️💙
• Thinking of you on the first night 🕎🤍

Spelling is a minor holy war. Hanukkah, Chanukah, Chanukkah: all are transliterations of the same Hebrew word, and all are fine. Pick the one the person you're writing to uses.

For the "🕎 meaning in hindi" searchers

Search Console tells us some people arrive at this site asking what 🕎 means in Hindi. So, in Hindi:

• 🕎 एक मेनोरा है, यानी नौ शाखाओं वाला दीपदान। यहूदी लोग हनुक्का (रोशनी का त्योहार) की आठ रातों में हर रात एक और मोमबत्ती जलाते हैं। बीच की नौवीं मोमबत्ती बाकी को जलाने के लिए होती है।

If that sounds familiar, it should. Both festivals are about lamps in the dark, both fall in the cooler months, and both have their own lamp emoji: 🕎 for Hanukkah and 🪔 for Diwali, which arrived four years later in 2019.

When Hanukkah overlaps the rest of December

In 2026 Hanukkah finishes on 12 December, nearly two weeks before Christmas, so the overlap that families joke about isn't really happening this year. Interfaith homes will still mix sets through the month, and it's easy to do well: 🕎🎄 side by side, without merging them into one hybrid symbol, respects both. Our Christmas emoji guide covers the other half of that household.

For the run from Hanukkah into the turn of the year, our winter and New Year combos pick up where the candles stop. And if you're planning a whole season of messages, the emoji calendar lists Hanukkah's start dates through 2028.

For more ready-made lines, the Hanukkah topic page groups every relevant glyph, our Hanukkah combos go longer and sillier, and the holiday countdown will tell you how many sleeps until the first candle.