Holidays!
September 24th, 2007 by amylherzog
Now that the difficult fast of Yom Kippur is over… well, let’s be clear about one thing first. The fasting is actually not so bad. Going without food and water for 26 hours? Not so difficult, as it turns out. Going without caffeine for 26 hours? Ye gods, please just run me over with a truck.
Ahem. Anyway, now that Yom Kippur is over, our thoughts turn to Wednesday night, when my personal favorite Jewish holiday begins. Sukkot is a harvest festival, a time of one of the long-ago great pilgrimages to Israel, and to celebrate it we live* in a ramshackle hut for 8 days. The hut is called a sukkah, and is usually decorated festively in the harvest theme.
*”Live”, since we’re Jewish, means “eat”.
After our rather ghetto attempt at a build-it-yourself sukkah last year, this year we decided to order an aluminum kit with canvas walls. Jacob was, uh, a little excited when he realized we were FINALLY going to open those EXCITING BOXES.
(That’s him saying “oh ho ho HOOOOO” over and over again, by the way.)
The frame was disgustingly easy to put together, and while the shiny metal ensures our sukkah will have a little bling this year, it’ll be nowhere near last year’s debacle.
Tomorrow, walls and a roof! Wednesday, decorations!
…and, apropos nothing, in the “He’s totally going to kill me for posting this, if he finds it later on in life” category:
(Don’t worry, kiddo. Your folks aren’t morning people, either.)
This made me smile when I read it and then again as I was putting the roof on our sukkah last night in the dark. Standing on the ladder, trying to arrange branches on the roof, I felt like I was part of a big party, instead of getting chores done after dark because the kids wouldn’t nap during the day. Shana Tova and Chag Sameach!