I am writing this on Friday, the second day of the 7/8 day Succot holiday, that we just love love love. Okay, it is true, for those of us hosting the friends and relatives it is work, work, work, but the best kind one could ask for truly! Celebrating the holiday of Succot, which among other things is a harvest festival holiday of sorts, in the land of Israel is truly special, and we are truly blessed to have this opportunity to celebrate this special time for the Jewish people together with our community. Since we are all eating and sleeping (some of the family, women are not required) in our succahs outside, (in our neighborhood we all have large porches for building our succahs) we are certainly quite aware of the neighbors, so I find it interesting that during this holiday we work on achdut, coming together as one!
Oh, and just by the way, our fellow Torah observant Jews outside of Israel are all celebrating the second day of Yom Tov today, meaning no phones, computers, turning on and off of lights, but cooking allowed, while here in Israel this is not a Yom Tov day, so phew, we can take showers, post on our blogs, make phone calls, and get ready to usher in Shabbat! I cooked enough of our favorite Moroccan salads to serve on shabbat as well, but still had to cook today Moroccan meat with Jeruslame artichokes, Moroccan fish, Moroccan chummous, Gefilte fish, Moroccan Hamin, and a no meat cholent for some vegetarian guests who will be joining us on the succah for Shabbat lunch. Sooooooo, with that in mind I must get going, and wishing you all an amazing succot holiday!
Disclaimer: The photo above is actually from my succah last year, this year's succah I made most of the decorations anew, (and worked for many hours, thus the lack of posts!) from recycled materials, and hoping to include those in a recycling crafts book project that has been too long in coming! No promises, as it is a huge amount of work. Just compiling the existing material and figuring out where there is a need for some new projects took me weeks, but I fortunately did this before succot, so not only does our succah look great, I now have a bunch of new projects, the only question being who is going to take all those great photos? And so the story goes.........