Tonight is the first night of Hannukah, which has, in English, more spellings than Gadaffi, and is a lot more fun.
Why thirty-six dreydlekh? The Hebrew word for life is “Chai,” represented by the letters chet and yod. It so happens that these two letters also represent the number eighteen, so eighteen symbolizes life and all good things that go with life (think l’chaim!, which also derives from chai)
So if chai is a good thing, obviously twice chai is even better, no?
By the way, the word dreydel comes from the Yiddish verb, dreyen, which means “to turn.” Yiddish is about 1000 years old, and the word dreydel is almost as old.
The Hebrew word for dreydel is sivivon. Hebrew is much older than Yiddish, but sivivon is a neologism, invented by Itamar Ben-Avi in 1887, when he was five years old. Itamar was the son of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the man who almost single-handedly brought about the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language in the modern era, and his son Itamar was the first native speaker of modern Hebrew.