13 October 2002—Sukkot is the
Jewish harvest festival. It falls about two weeks after the High Holy
Days, and though I’ve wanted to celebrate it at my house for a
long time, I’m usually kind of Jewed out by that point. This year,
though, since Sarah was about to move in, our friend Valerie really
wanted us to have a Sukkot celebration as a symbol of our beginning
to make a home together.
Sukkot is a neat holiday — basically adapted
from a similar pagan celebration, it’s a weeklong festival, literally,
of booths, the booths in this case meant to be temporary structures
evoking the huts the Israelites lived in during harvest season. For
the Jewish celebration, you’re supposed to build a sukkah (sukkot
is the plural of sukkah) and, ideally, live in it for a week.
At the very least, it’s nice to have your meals out there.
So Valerie encouraged us to build a sukkah in our
back yard, and indeed, I finally got to celebrate Sukkot at home. It
was a major construction project, though we designed it so that it should
come apart fairly easily, and in this way we can store it and reuse
it for years to come. (We actually have yet to take it down; we must
get on that project.)
Once it was built, we had a small celebration with
friends, and the pictures, start to finish, are below. Thanks especially
to Rodrigo and Lynne, who helped us construct it (and also to Lynne
for helping us get the back yard back into presentability), and to everyone
who came and decorated it. This was truly a community effort, and we’re
looking forward to many more harvest seasons.
