Monday, April 2, 2007

Kadesh, Urchatz, Karpas, Yachatz...

At last, a Pesach post!

So today my sister and I spent a long time working on the seder table. We're having my cousins over for the first days (so that's two families - four adults and seven kids all together), two sets of grandparents, and then us (my family is six all together) so that makes twenty-one people on the first night, and a possible twenty-second on the second (another cousin might be coming from the other side of the family). That's a lot of people to seat around the table. We have four tables pushed together so everyone can fit, so my sister and I had to make place cards for everyone. Otherwise it's too crazy to have everyone try to find seats.

We usually make place cards but this year we wanted to do something cute with them. So for the first night, inside each place card is another phrase from "Adir Hu," so when we get up to it, each person can shout out his/her phrase (yes, we're a really corny family :) it's awesome). For the second night, inside each place card is either a line answering the question "__ mi yodeah?" from "Echad, mi yodeah" or a personality from Chad Gadya. It was a lot of fun making them and drawing little pictures on each one, but it got a bit tedious. Then we had to figure out where everyone was sitting because my mom told me to put families together, but there are certain cousins who want to sit together, too, so it got a bit complicated. But finally, it was all worked out.

We also have felt masks for the Chad Gadya personalities and for the makot. They're really funny. And we have these little dolls for each of the makot, too, scattered around the table, and these little plastic frogs with flipper things on them that you hold down and then let go and they flip. Hopefully they'll keep everyone entertained throughout the seder, especially maggid which can get long for some of the younger cousins.

Right now I'm so hungry because there's hardly anything to eat today. It's frustrating not being able to eat chametz but also not being able to each matzah or anything else we'll be eating at the seder, either. Every year on this day, my mom (or one of my aunts, whoever's hosting the seder that year - we switch off houses annually) makes a stew which we eat all afternoon since there's basically nothing else. That, and we usually have pesach chocolate chip cookies which I seem to remember tasting better than they actually do. I guess everything's relative. They do taste better than a lot of other kosher l'pesach food. We completely stopped buying those cereals (fruity o's, honey stars, etc.). They taste worse than eating cardboard. Really vile. And macaroons are even worse. Ew. But that's mostly because I really don't like coconut. My dad likes macaroons, I think. But he likes a lot of interesting foods (like all these weird, random juices with green algae and spinach and other green, healthy things that definitely were not meant to be in beverages).

Anyway, I wish you all a chag kasher v'sameach!

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