Oh, waitress, can we have the booth?
Tonight begins yet another exciting holiday, Sukkot (soo-COAT), or the Feast of Tabernacles. It lasts 7 days and has another fun holiday tacked on at the end (more on this next week), so it’s kind of like eight. My friends used to be able to keep track of this because my answering machine would have the message, “Hi, you’ve reached Becca. I can’t answer the phone right now because I’m out in my tabernacle.” Yes, we Jews build little structures outside where we eat, drink, and make merry. Some people even sleep in them but I was never much into camping. The sukkah, or booth, is made of wood or canvas or whatever but the roof has to be made of something that grows, like branches or bamboo and you have to be have more shade than sun. Most people make all sorts of fun decorations and hang things from the s’chach (that’s the roof material).
Having a sukkah in the chilly Northeast is somewhat of a challenge. Plus you have raccoons and bees to enliven your meals. When I was growing up we used to hang fruit from the s’chach and the raccoons used to pull up the string, eat the fruit, then leave the core hanging there. Good times, good times. Nowadays, I live the city life so I usually go away for at least part of the holiday so I can eat in a sukkah. This weekend I’ll be in fabulous New Jersey where the forecast is for rain. But hey, at least that will chase away the bees.
So why do we do all that, you may wonder. Because we’re crazy! But aside from that, it’s to commemorate the time when upon our exodus from Egypt (see Exodus, the book or Bob Marley song, for more) we lived in temporary dwellings in the desert, where presumably there were no raccoons and hanging apple cores.
The picture at the top is of my sukkah. Well, no, it’s just a cute cartoon I found on the Internets. But let’s pretend. Here’s a picture of former ROTMs’ Celia & Alex’s sukkah. Lovely!
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This is also a great day for the Jewish people because it’s my birthday but, well, I still haven’t been able to find that anywhere in the Torah. I’ll keep looking.
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This one goes out to, um, me.
Happy Birthday Bec for the eleventy seventh time! Love, light and cupcakes aplenty to you in the year ahead!
Happy Birthday Becca!!
Happy Birthday Becca!
Maybe you could hang birthday cupcakes from the s’chach? That would be mighty festive. And think of what fun the raccoons would have with that! Nothing like wildlife hopped up on sugar..
Thanks, guys!
Happy Birthday, Smoochy Baby!
This coming year is going to be your best yet, I just know it.
I think so too, Jane, I really do.
Many happy cupcakes to you!
Shoot, Becca. We got better pictures of the sukkah than that one!
Everybody, please imagine that you can see the INSIDE, where it’s all decorated with fall-themed decorations from Michael’s: garlands of red and orange (fake) leaves, and little pieces of (fake) fruits and vegetables hung from the walls and the roof by florist wire. You use fruits and vegetables because, in addition to remembering the Israelites living in temporary dwellings in the wilderness, Sukkot doubles as a fall harvest festival. But, as Becca noted, if you use REAL fruits and vegetables, you attract so many yellowjackets that you can’t use the sukkah.
Chag sameach (happy holiday), Becca and others!
Happy Birthday Becca! Have a fun happy holiday, too!
Happy Birthday!
Just don’t put a dishwasher in it. Trust me.
Happy belated birthday, Becca!
The Jewish students’ association used to build a sukkah when I was in college, and I always felt bad for them when it rained.
Happy birthday!
A little late but hey, I made it back didn’t I?
Happy belated birthday!
I wondered this weekend what little kids in Hebrew school do now. I remember making many a sukkah out of green plastic strawberry or tomato baskets, but they don’t have those much anymore. The clear plastic clamshells don’t really have that same sukkah feeling, if for no other reason, clams aren’t kosher.
Just something to think about.
Kay, they make them out of graham crackers. The roof is made of pretzel sticks, and decorations are lifesavers attached with licorice shoestrings.
I seem to remember frosting is involved in connecting the graham crackers.
The structural integrity is an issue. These are best eaten on site.
Oh, now I feel completely ripped off. Good thing I didn’t know about this last week or I would have crashed more than one Hebrew school class this weekend.
Do you get presents on all of these holidays? I love presents.
Happy Birthday Becca!
Hi, I’m home! Thanks, everyone, and since I’ll be in and out the next few days, feel free to discuss candy sukkah building amongst yourselves.
And I did get presents. Not holiday presents, birthday presents. Just to clarify.
These sukkot sound suspiciously like the little graham cracker “gingerbread houses” one sees in all the women’s magazines come November. They aren’t landscaped with cleverly arranged gumdrops and Chickles, are they?
Next we’ll be making Maccabees out of stacked up marshmallows and exchanging baskets of Passover peeps.
My younger daughter had the cleverest teacher in the three year-old class at preschool. Brought home a construction paper lulav and a papier mache etrog. Also some sort of origami sukkah.
I have seen Peeps marked Kosher l’Pesach so you might be onto something with that last idea…
This is great. Just keep going like this.
Let my Peep-le go!
Becca, we might need a new topic.
Although I can share an amusing anecdote involving candy and holidays. (Amusing to me, anyhow.)
When my kids were fairly small (3 & 6, I guess?), we went for Xmas to the home of my sister-in-law, who was having a big thing at her place with her family and her husband’s. My kids were relatively unacquainted with Christmas, although they did (and still do) receive gifts from my husband’s family that are opened on 12/25. My younger daughter (I think it was the younger one) came across some little foil-wrapped chocolate Santas–the kind where the picture is printed on the foil and the same shape chocolate could be a Santa or a wooden soldier or whatever. She scrutinized the bearded guy in the picture and announced, “Oh, look, it’s Judah Macabee.”
(The older daughter is featured in a similar anecdote involving misconstruing a Christmas picture (decorations, tapers lit) in the Disney Store catalog as “Mickey and Minnie having Shabbos.” But this story doesn’t involve candy so I cannot tie it in to the assigned topic of candy sukkah building.)
In my family, 12/25 is Thanksgiving II. We have a big dinner together, because, well, everyone is off work and what else are you going to do, really?
We like to call Thanksgiving and Christmas the “fabulous feeding frenzy” in my family. I truly can be an art form.
Sorry, I’m a little off topic – Kay just made me think of that!
Oops, IT truly can be an art form. I on the other hand am truly NOT an art form :p
Happy Birthday!!