What a Strange Time This Is

Passover, Easter, Ramadan… we are NOT cancelling our holidays, but we are celebrating/observing with a little less family at our tables and without the time we normally spend in our house of worship.

If you observe one of these holidays, like me, I am sure you are thinking, it doesn’t even feel like… Passover has always been one of my favorite holidays. As a young child I would go to sleep the night before and when I woke in the morning, like magic, everything in the kitchen had changed. I truly thought it was magical and never realized the hours my mom spent to “kasher” (clean) the kitchen, change dishes and restock the pantry with the type of food we would be permitted to eat over the next eight days. Even more fun were the Seders where we told the story of the Exodus and my parents hosted dinner for so many relatives. And oh the fun of taking that first bite of horseradish and watching to see who ran first for a tall glass of water!

When I got married, by then I knew the work involved, but it was so worth it. After my parents passed I started hosting large Seders and sometimes there were as many as 24 at our table. It was a lot of work, not magic, but as I watched my own children’s faces it was so very worth it. As they grew they would always ask their friends to come over, it was always a special time whether our guests observed or not. I admit as I gotten older and our children are now adults with their own spouses and homes, I’ve begun to cater the size of the crowd a bit because, yes, it is a lot of work.

And this year (sigh), it is all different. Our son and daughter-in-love are EMTs and in the frontlines of this COVID crisis; our son-in-love is with the FD and also on the frontlines and our daughter waits for him each day at home. This year our Seder table will seat just the two of us, my husband and me. Between the important work they are all doing, the Stay-at-Home orders, and the scary risk of infections, we will be just the two of us. Our daughter is planning to “host” a short ZOOM Seder on the 2^nd night so at least through the gift of electronics we can share a bit of the holiday with them. If our son and his wife have the time in te very busy schedules, maybe we’ll see them too.

I shouldn’t be complaining, I know. Everything just feels so surreal. Shopping was an adventure as we certainly couldn’t go hopping from store to store, so many of the shelves were bare anyway. We certainly have more than enough, especially since it is JUST THE TWO OF US. I am thankful it is the two of us, we have each other at a time when families are being destroyed. And I am thankful that we can use a computer and pretend, at least for a short while, that we are actually together with our offspring. I know I will get choked up when, at the end of the Seder service, we say the line “Next year in Israel”, what I will really be wishing for is “Next year with our family.”

I wish all of you a warm and loving holiday season and the promise of your family’s safety and health and that next year you can all be together to celebrate.

Moments of Memories ~ #Monday Blogs

You’re standing at the stove and preparing a holiday dinner, suddenly all you can see in front of you is an image of your mom in front of her kitchen stove preparing the dinner for the same holiday many years earlier. Memories of a childhood long ago spring to the forefront unexpectedly, welcomed by your heart and met with a tear on your cheek.

It’s Passover in our home and I prepare the Seder for a family gathering each year. Our table is filled with our children and their spouses, close friends and assorted siblings (varying each year depending on individual schedules). Good and plentiful food, so many traditional recipes… we take turns retelling the story of the Exodus when the Hebrews fled Egypt. Four questions asked and answered, the bitter herbs remind us of tears, the sweet charoses to remind us of the mortar used to build the pyramids, and Shmura Matzoh to remind us of the haste that our ancestors left Pharoah’s land.

The plates on my Passover table were my mother-in-law’s, the Seder plate was my mom’s, the Haggada story belong to all the generations. L’dor v’dor, from generation to generation, we are commanded to retell the story as if we were living it ourselves. There’s laughter as we “personalize” the tale.

Inevitably we each bring our memories to the table, some different and some shared. The older generation laughs about the Seders we shared with our parents. The younger generation remembers a few years before when they dressed up to re-enact the Passover story. And every delicious bite of our festive meal is spiced with the sweetness of happy times.

One day our children will share their memories with their families, a few tears will stain their cheeks, laughter will surround their table, and the sweet memories will once again be welcomed as new ones are made for future generations.

from 2008 for #ThrowbackThursday ~ The Magic of Passover

In time for Pesach, here's an older article about Passover preparations & festivities. This year, 2014, has been wonderful, although our first seder was just three of us (hubby, son & me, future dil was working & daughter & sil were with his side of the family). The 2nd seder was lovely, a table of 13, unfortunately not everyone invited was able to make it. It was a fun time with lots of laughter and good food. ...still my favorite holiday.

As a child I loved waking up the morning before the first Passover Seder to see our kitchen so sparkling with aluminum foil lining the stove and refrigerator shelves. The special dishes were set on the table and the good silverware was polished and sparkly. All of the “chometz” (any mixture that contains flour and water that has been allowed to ferment) was GONE, often hidden away in a cardboard box in a bedroom closet or such. The food pantry was chock full of delicious chocolate covered jell rings, jars of gefilte fish (mom didn’t make her own), matzo farfel for turkey stuffing, sweet grape wine, apples, walnuts and other delicious treats.

When the extended family came to the Seder on either (or both) of the first nights, my folks had folding tables set up that stretched across the living room effectively dissecting the bathroom and kitchen side of the room. Depending on how much horseradish you took on your gefilte fish, you were happy, or not, that you sat on one side of the table or the other – the dash for water rivaled the great Exodus by itself! My dad did not read Hebrew, neither did many of the other relatives, and trust me, English was not my dad’s first language. So the reading of the Haggadah (the story of the Exodus) was always a lot of fun as daddy substituted words.

As far as I was concerned, Passover was pure magic. Passover has always been my very favorite holiday.

Now I am the mom and the wife. It is my kitchen that I line with aluminum foil. It’s my pantry that gets scoured and restocked. It is my table that hosts family Seders for up to 20 people (the largest was 24!). And oy, it is my back that feels the strain year after year.

This year as I folded myself pretzel-like to line my pantry shelves and realized that I am not nearly as flexible as I once was, I began to wonder if perhaps I fell in love with the holiday and its “magic” because I was not the one originally doing all of the work.

But as we sat around the Seder table on the first two nights (the first was just the 6 of us, the 2^nd night we had 16) and we took turns reading from the Haggadah – in English with the prayers being done in Hebrew by those who knew it – there was so much laughter and so many jokes. There are jokes that are repeated year after year and still are laughed at, like the parsley dipped in salt water that we call the salad course of the meal, red faces after the horseradish is passed on matzo (home ground from fresh root!), and many, MANY impromptu comments thrown in during the evening.

The service and meal takes approximately 4 to 5 hours. That is 4 hours or more of captivated audience even though I have more table room than mom did and my home is not dissected by the elongated table. (But it was still a riot when my son, seated at the far end, handed his father, seated at the head of the table, a walkie-talkie so they could “communicate”!) And as I sat there, hopping up between courses to serve, I noticed something significant – the magic is the family. It is the laughter, it’s the joy, it’s the good food, it’s the love and it’s time together.

There is such a magic – I love the Passover holiday.