As in most American Jewish families, our lives are a mash-up of heritages and food traditions. David is Eastern European and German, with a smoky layer of Kansas City barbecue culture. Susan is southern Italian and Sicilian. She learned about keeping kosher through conversion classes. Even before the calendar collision, we were mixing it up in ricotta blintzes with pignoli, Shavuot lasagna and other holiday meals.

She suggested we add fresh horseradish to the matzo balls, a perfect nod to David’s grandfather, who liked to carve bits tableside from a huge, gnarly root. So festive. It was also Melissa’s idea to serve our Hanukkah brisket next to the turkey, as if she knew that David’s grandmother always served two kinds of meat at every holiday, a subconscious demonstration of abundance by a Holocaust survivor who understood privation.

Our kitchen filled up with Aleppo pepper and sticky jars of pomegranate molasses when our son Daniel began to recreate the Sabbath meals he ate at the homes of his Syrian Jewish friends from the Midwood section of Brooklyn, near our home in Ditmas Park. Why not add those flavors, and cranberries, to the brisket, Melissa suggested.

We’d been thinking that the perfect Plymouth Rock-Maccabee combo would be Hanukkah sufganiyot — the fried jelly doughnuts that originated in Poland and are now ubiquitous in Israel — filled with Portuguese pumpkin preserves. (The preserves became breakfast staples after Daniel, who now lives in Seattle, agreed to come along and visit his brother, Jonathan, in Berlin last December if we would stop off in sunny southern Portugal on the way home.)

But Melissa had a better idea. Keep the preserves, but spread them on top of the inevitable fried centerpiece of our Hanukkah meals and memories: latkes, which have been holiday essentials since David’s mother lost a few layers of knuckle while grating potatoes each year. Back in 1992, in fact, the food writer Molly O’Neill playfully named David “the Latke King” in her “New York Cookbook,” and included the recipe he had modified from his mother’s and grandmother’s.

We now use a food processor to make big batches, sometimes just for the family, sometimes for 60 friends or more. We cover our range with a collection of aromatic cast-iron skillets handed down from the matriarchs on both sides, and turn the kitchen exhaust fan on high. Then, until the potatoes, onions and matzo meal run out, we fry them in olive oil. It may be the liquid symbol of Hanukkah, but in our house it’s imported from Italy.

With latkes on the Thanksgiving table this year, there won’t be any need for stuffing. And the absence of the usual applesauce is a reminder that traditions, comforting as they are, often act as blinders to culinary possibilities.

After all, there’s nothing sacred, or even particularly Jewish, about the latke. It’s an ancient European comfort food woven fairly recently into the braid of Hanukkah by the Ashkenazic Jews, solely because it was fried in fat (and usually goose fat). Our family was reminded of this last year in Mainz, Germany, when Jonathan led us to some stunningly good potato pancakes (known in the Rhineland as reibekuchen) served hot out of the fryer at a freezing outdoor Christmas market not far from the rural villages of David’s grandparents.

Latkes are no more authentic to the origin story of Hanukkah than pumpkin pie is to the first Thanksgiving, so why not play with both holiday traditions? The original Hanukkah pancake, as Gil Marks notes in the “Encyclopedia of Jewish Food,” was made in medieval Italy out of curd cheese (probably ricotta), an allusion to the apocryphal Jewish heroine Judith, who subdued a foe using wine and cheese.

That fits right into our family’s regular shopping list, but it’s hardly the only way different Jewish cultures have taken from their surroundings. A dusty 1958 volume from David’s mother’s collection, “The Jewish Cook Book,” by Mildred Grosberg Bellin, claims that the traditional Hanukkah meal should be buckwheat latkes and roast goose. That sounds a little grim, but somewhere, a kid must have loved it.

We won’t be the only family crowding into the kitchen this year, mixing holiday flavors and inventing new customs on our feet. Home cooks have been doing that for centuries, and this year’s supercollider is an invitation to make something new that lasts. But not cranberry sauce with raisins.