Happy Passover!

[donutsweeper]

A very late happy Passover to everyone!

I meant to take pictures of everything as we did the seder, (seder is the Hebrew word for order and is the special dinner that tells the story of Passover) but everything kind of got away from me so... here's a few pictures instead.



This is the seder plate. Going clockwise you can see the roasted egg, shank bone (really a turkey drumstick that's been frozen a reused for a good decade now), an orange (more on that below), parsley and charosets. In the center is horseradish.

Charosets represents the mortar used by the Jewish slaves to build the pyramids, etc in Egypt. I make two kinds, the traditional Ashkenazi version with apples, walnuts, sugar and wine and a Sephardic version with dried fruit (raisins, currants, dates, prunes), nuts and wine.

New this year is the orange, my 15 yr old daughter learned about it and asked we included it. It was first added to the seder plate by Susannah Heschel, a gesture of solidarity with Jewish lesbians and gay men, and others who are marginalized within the Jewish community. (More info here.)



Here's the matzoh cover my mom's had forever and we use every year. It has 3 pieces of matzot inside, the middle piece is broken in two during the seder and hidden as the afikoman. My kids are way too old for this tradition but hey, tradition and all that.

And here are my candlesticks, we got them as a wedding present from my parents, way back when.

Comments

[donutsweeper.livejournal.com]

I've never been to a very strictly religious seder so I can't comment on how it's done there. There are some seders done entirely in Hebrew and they last ALL NIGHT and if someone makes a mistake you have to start over from the beginning (a woman I worked with at the JCC was very religious and this was a huge problem because the dinner would be cooking and get ruined and people would get drunk- there are 4 glass of wine drunk during different parts of the seder with a prayer for each and sometimes the youngest would fall asleep before it was time for them to ask the ma nishtana, the Four Questions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_four_questions))

[rustydog.livejournal.com]

Wow, that would be a lot of pressure!

[donutsweeper.livejournal.com]

Our seder is SHORT. It was about 15/20 minutes when the kids were little and is only maybe 45 min now but I still spend the whole time back and forth to the kitchen checking on things and stressing. (Not sure why, yes there are several courses, but most can't be screwed up) And there's never a ton of people, I think the most I ever had was 12, including 3 kids. Some people have 20 or 30 or even 40 people and make it this HUGE DEAL and whatnot. We are rather low key about the whole thing.