Wednesday, April 4, 2007

more Seder in the blogosphere

Thanks to all the readers who sent me more examples. (Here's the first installment.)

Allergic Girl (Please Don't Pass the Nuts): "We spent a lovely and very delicious allergen-free second night Sephardic seder at the home of my dear literary agent friend and her family. As she placed each dish she placed on the table, she listed its ingredients.... Telling the table what was in each dish was a lovely introduction to another culture's traditional foods and also a subtle way of letting me know exactly what I was eating and thus allaying any minor anxieties I might have about partaking. It sounds like a small thing but it made a huge difference."

Hadar (Vegetable Adventures): "A couple of hours before the Seder, Chad had an inspiring (though somewhat gross) idea, and we embarked on an artistic project: we made images of the Ten Plagues out of Fimo, baked them, and placed one on each plate." (Photo below.)

Kitten (A Pocketful of Hope): "Last night Matt and I had the pleasure of attending our first Pesach celebration at my friend Rebecca's house. We were two of the four 'visitors' to the event. We sang, drank, ate amazing food, and commemorating the tortures of the Jews in Egypt and God saving them and leading them out the desert. [sic] ... Once again I am reminded of how interested I am in learning more about Judaism, about possibly converting."

Leah (Mideast Youth): "'Where are you gonna be for the Seder?' asked my brother, who has never invited me or my family to his seder in the 11 years we've been here (and he won't come to my place outside Jerusalem because he likes to invite his 1,875,082 friends over to his). 'My friends.' 'Which friends?' ... He'd already made peace with the fact that his nutty baby sister has Moslem and Christian friends. But he still hasn't got a clue that I have a bunch of Messianic Jewish friends as well. That fact is a bit harder for me to 'let out of the closet' than anything else."

Victory of Roses (Defending Our Hard-Won Uncertainties): "We had the standard-for-us Maxwell House haggadah (which includes quasi-old-fashioned second person usages that make the King James Bible seem sensible). We skipped some bits, with my cousin Janet (who was leading the seder) saying that these were the ones Grandpa used to skip. (If I needed to abridge it, I'd drop the bit about the rabbis arguing that 10 plagues were really forty or fifty, plus 50 or 200 or 250 in the Red Sea.)"

Robin Reagler (The Other Mother: Letters from the Outposts of Lesbian Parenting): "The search for the afikomen (a big cracker wrapped up in cloth) was perhaps the funniest part of the evening. The kids were so excited about the prizes they would get if they found the hidden object, that they could barely focus their eyes. They danced and shrieked for 10 minutes. By the end, all the adults were literally pointing at it in the bookshelves."

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OK, coming right up: Easter. Here's a nice how-to on making hollowed-out Easter Eggs.

Posted by Joshua Glenn at 02:09 PM

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