Do you light 2 candles or one for every family member?

Senior Member Joined: Feb 15 2011 Posts: 109

Haven't read through EVERY single reply, but from what I did, I haven't noticed another option....
My friend lights 7 candles from when she got married. No adding.

My mother lit two when she got married, and added one when my oldest brother was born. She lit 3 candles for many years (even though she had 9 children by then) and one day decided to change her minhag and light 1 per child.
I also light 2+ one per child. At least two are oil (usually all ) and as a guest I just light two.

My mother, mil, and all grandmothers only lit 2, so that is what I do. I wasn't going to start a new minhag.

I light two and then add for each child.
The funny thing is that very soon after we got married, I forgot to light one week (a whole story as to why Smile

) and the rav told me that I had to add another one if I forgot. So, I was lighting three even before my daughter was a thought in our eye.
Then it happened again and I am lighting four and once again, we are only three. So, for almost my entired married life I have been lighting one more candle than people in our family.

My grandmother used to light an entire candelabra and she only had one child. She was lighting for her family lost in the shoa. I guess another minhag.

I light 2 +1 for each kid.
My mil lights 2 and then 1 for all the kids as a group so it's a total of 3.
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Don't worry that children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you

Another member - Layke - asked me to post this for her:

"My mother z"l lit only two candles and I do likewise. She told me that the reason she does this was that there was a pogrom in her small Ukrainian birthplace one Friday evening (sometimes in 1918-1919 , when she was a young girl.) The perpertrators of the pogrom used the cnadlesticks they found in the houses to set fire to the thatched roofs. The Rov of the town said that the women should light only two candles henceforth, in memory of this terrible pogrom."
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"Olam Chessed Yiboneh", Tehilim 89.

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